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Ho. 3. 

THE 



ANTI-SLAVERY EXAMINER 



LETTER OF GERRIT SMITH 



REV. JAMES SMYLIE, 



STATE OF MISSISSIPPI. 




NEW YORK: 

PUBLISHED BY R. G. WILLIAMS, 

FOR THE AMERICAN ANTI SLAVERY SOCIETY, 

NO. 3 SPRUCE STREET. 



1837. 



Postage.— This periodical contains four and a half sheets. Postage under 100 
miles, 6 3-4 cents ; over 100 miles, 13 1-2 cents. 

JJ3 3 * Please read and circulate. ^j(L 









"r> 



LETTER, Etc, 



Peterboro', October 28, 1836. 
Rtv. James Smylie, 

Late Stated Clerk of the Presbytery of Mississippi : 

Sir, — Accept my thanks for your politeness in sending me a copy 
of your book on slavery. This book proves, that the often repeated 
assertion, that the whole South is opposed to the discussion of the 
question of slavery, is not true : — and so far, I rejoice in its appear- 
ance. I presume — I know, indeed, that you are not the only man in 
the South, who is in favor of this discussion. There are, doubtless, 
many persons in the South, who believe, that all attempts to suppress 
it, are vain, as well as wicked. Besides, you virtually admit, that 
the South is compelled to discuss the question of slavery ; or, at least, 
to give her own views of it, in order to prevent the conscience of 
Southern Christians — that conscience, " which does make cowards 
of us all" — from turning traitor to the cause of slavery. I rejoice, 
too, that you accompanied the copy sent to me, with the request, that 
I should review it, and make " candid remarks" upon it ; and, that 
you have thus put it in my power to send to the South some of my 
views on slavery, without laying myself open to the charge of being 
discourteous and obtrusive. 

You undertake to show that slavery existed, and, with the Divine 
approbation, amongst the Old Testament Jews ; and that it also 
existed, whilst our Saviour and his Apostles were on the earth, and 
was approved by them. You thence argue, that it is not only an in- 
nocent institution, but one which it is a religious duty to maintain. 

I admit, for the sake of argument, that there was a servitude in the 
patriarchal families which was approved by God. But what does this 
avail in your defence of slavery, unless you show, that that servitude 
and slavery are essentially alike ? The literal terms of the relation 
of master and servant, under that servitude, are not made known to 
ua ; but we can, nevertheless, confidently infer their spirit from facts, 



which illustrate their practical character ; and, if this character be 
found to be opposite to that of slavery, then it is manifest, that what 
you say of patriarchal servitude is impertinent, and tends to mislead, 
rather than enlighten your readers. To a few of these facts and a 
few of the considerations arising from them, I now call your attention. 

1st. Read the first eight verses of the eighteenth chapter of Gene- 
sis, and tell me, if you ever saw Gov. M'Dufne or any other South- 
ern patriarch (for the governor desires to have all slaveholders looked 
upon in the character of patriarchs) putting himself on a level with 
his servants, and " working with his hands," after the manner of 
Abraham and Sarah 1 

2d. There was such a community of interest — so much of mutual 
confidence — between Abraham and his servants, that they fought his 
battles. Indeed, the terms of this patriarchal servitude were such, 
that in the event of the master's dying without issue, one of his ser- 
vants inherited his property (Gen. 15: 3). But, according to the 
code of Southern slavery, the slave can no more own property, than 
he can own himself. " All that a slave possesses belongs to his 
master" — " Slaves are incapable of inheriting or transmitting pro- 
perty." These, and many similar phrases, are found in that code. 
Severe as was the system of Roman slavery, yet in this respect, it 
was far milder than yours ; for its subjects could acquire property 
(their peculium) ; and frequently did they purchase their liberty with 
it. So far from Southern slaves being, as Abraham's servants were, 
a dependence in war, it is historically true, that they are accustomed 
to improve this occasion to effect their escape, and strengthen the 
hands of the enemy. As a further proof that Southern slavery begets 
none of that confidence between master and slave, which character- 
ized the mutual intercourse of Abraham and his servants — the slave 
is prohibited, under severe penalties, from having any weapons in his 
possession, even in time of peace ; and the nightly patrol, which the 
terror-stricken whites of Southern towns keep up, in peace, as well as 
in war, argues any thing, rather than the existence of such confidence. 
" For keeping or carrying a gun, or powder or shot, or a club, or 
other weapon whatsoever, offensive or defensive, a slave incurs, says 
a Southern statute book, for each offence, thirty-nine lashes." 

3d. When I read your quotation from the twenty-fourth chapter of 
Genesis, made for the purpose of showing that God allowed Abraham 
to have slaves, I could not but wonder at your imprudence, in med- 
dling with this chapter, which is of itself, enough to convince any 
unbiased mind, that Abraham's servants held a relation to their 



master and to society, totally different from that held by Southern 
slaves. Have you ever known a great man in your state send his 
slave' into another to choose a wife for his son ? — And if so, did the 
lily white damsel he selected call the sable servant " my lord ?" — And 
did her family spare no pains to manifest respect for their distin- 
guished guest, and promote his comfort'? But this chapter, which 
you call to your aid, informs us, that Abraham's servant was honored 
with such tokens of confidence and esteem. If a Southern slave shall 
ever be employed in such a mission, he may count himself highly 
favored, if he be not taken up by the way, imprisoned, and " sold for 
his jail fees." 

4th. Did you ever know Southern slaves contend for their rights 
with their masters ? "When a Southern master reads the thirteenth 
verse of the thirty-first chapter of Job, he must think that Job was in 
the habit of letting down his dignity very low. 

5th. Do Southern masters accord religious privileges and impart 
religious instruction equally to their slaves and their children? Your 
laws, which visit with stripes, imprisonment, and death, the attempt 
to teach slaves to read the Bible, show but too certainly, that the 
Southern master, who should undertake to place " his children and 
his househo'd" on the same level, in respect to their religious advan- 
tages, as it is probable that Abraham did (Gen. 18 : 19), would soon 
find himsell in the midst of enemies, not to his reputation only, but to 
his life also. 

And now, sir, admitting that the phrase, on which you lay so much 
stress — " bough* with his money" — was used in connexion with a 
form of servitude which God approved — I put it to your candor, 
whether this phrase should be allowed to weigh at all against the facts 
I have adduced and the reasonings I have employed to show the true 
nature of that servitude, and how totally unlike it is to slavery? Are 
you not bound by the principles of sound reasoning, to attach to it a 
meaning far short of what, I grant, is its natural import in this age, 
and, especially, amongst a people who, like ourselves, are accustomed 
to associate such an expression with slavery? Can you deny, that 
you are bound to adopt such a meaning of it, as shall harmonize with 
the facts, which illustrate the nature of the servitude in question, and 
with the laws and character of Him, whose sanction you claim for 
that servitude ? An opposite course would give a preference to words 
over things, which common sense could not tolerate. Many instances 
might be cited to show the absurdity of the assumption that whatever 
is spoken of in the Scriptures as being " bought," is property. Boaz 



6 

"purchased" his wife. Hosea "bought her (his wife) for fifteen 
pieces of silver.'' Jacob, to use a common expression, " took his 
wages" in wives. Joseph "bought" the Egyptians, after they had said 
to him " buy us." But, so far from their having become the property 
of Joseph or of his king, it was a part of the bargain, that they were 
to have as much land as they wanted — seed to sow it — and four-fifths 
of the crops. The possessors of such independence and such means 
of wealth are not the property of their fellow-men. 

I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the 
servitude in the patriarchal families. I pass on, now, to the period 
between the promulgation of the Divine law by Moses, and the birth 
of Christ. 

You argue from the fifth and sixth verses of the twenty-first chap- 
ter of Exodus, that God authorized the enslavement of the Jews : 
but, on the same page, on which you do so, you also show the con- 
trary. It may, nevertheless, be well for me to request you to read 
and read again Leviticus 25 : 39 — 42, until your remaining doubts, 
on this point, shall all be put to flight. I am free to admit the proba- 
bility, that under some of the forms of servitude, in which Jews were 
held, the servant was subjected to a control so extensive as to expose 
him to suffer great cruelties. These forms corresponded with the 
spirit and usages of the age, in which they existed ; entirely unsuited, 
as they are, to a period and portion of the world, blessed with the 
refining and softening influences of civilization and the gospel. 
Numerous as were the statutory regulations for the treatment of the 
servant, they could not preclude the large discretion of the master. 
The apprentice, in our country, is subjected to an authority, equalling 
a parent's authority, but not always tempered in its exercise, with a 
parent's love. His condition is, therefore, not unfrequently marked 
with severity and suffering. Now, imagine what this condition would 
be, under the harsh features of a more barbarous age, and you will 
have in it, as I conjecture, no distant resemblance to that of some of 
the Jewish servants. But how different is this condition from that of 
the slave! 

I am reminded in this connexion, of the polished, but pernicious, 
article on slavery in a late number of the Biblical Repertory. In 
that article Professor Hodge says, that the claim of the slaveholder 
" is found to be nothing more than a transferable claim of service 
either for life, or for a term of years." Will he allow me to ask him, 
where he discovered that the pretensions of the slaveholder are all 
resolvable into this modest claim 1 He certainly did not discover it 



in any slave code ; nor in any practical slavery. Where then? No 
where, but in that undisclosed system of servitude, which is the crea- 
tion of his own fancy. To this system I raise no objection whatever. 
On the contrary, I am willing to admit its beauty and its worthiness 
of the mint in which it was coined. But I protest against his right 
to bestow upon it the name of another and totally different thing. He 
must not call it slavery. 

Suppose a poor German to be so desirous of emigrating with his 
family to America, as to agree to give his services for ten years, as 
a compensation for the passage. Suppose further, that the services 
are to be rendered to the captain of the ship in which they sail, or to 
any other person, to whom he may assign his claim. Such a bargain 
is not uncommon. Now, according to Professor Hodge, this German 
may as rightly as any of your Southern servants, be called a slave. 
He may as rightly be called property, as they may be, who, in the lan- 
guage of the South Carolina laws, " shall be deemed, held, taken, 
reputed, and adjudged in law, to be chattels personal, in the hands 
of their owners and possessors, and their executors, administrators, 
and assigns, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever." 

We will glance at a few points of difference in their condition. 
1st. The German is capable of making a contract, and in the case 
supposed, does make a contract ; but your slave is incapable of mak- 
ing any contract. 2d. The German receives wages ; the price of 
carrying himself and family being the stipulated price for his services, 
during the ten years ; but your slave receives no wages. 3d. The 
German, like any other hireling, and, like any apprentice in our coun- 
try, is under the protection of law. But, there is no law to shield the 
slave from wrongs. Being a mere chattel or thing, he has no rights ; 
and, therefore, he can have no wrongs to be redressed. Does Pro- 
fessor Hodge say, that there are statutes limiting and regulating the 
power of the slaveholder ? I grant there are ; though it must be re- 
membered, that there is one way of even murdering a slave, which 
some of the slave States do not only not forbid, but impliedly and 
practically admit.* The Professor should know, however, that all 

* The licensed murder referred to, is that where the slave dies under " moderate 
correction." But is not the murder of a slave by a white man, mi any way, practi- 
cally licensed in all the slave States ? Who ever heard of a white man's being put 
to death, under Southern laws, for the murder of a slave ? American slavery pro- 
vides impunity for the white murderer of the slave, by its allowing none but whites 
— none but those who construct and uphold the system of abominations — to testify 
against the murderer. But why particularize causes of this impunity ? The whole 



these statutes are, practically, a mere nullity. Nevertheless, they 
show the absoluteness of the power which they nominally qualify. 
This absoluteness is as distinctly implied by them, as the like was by 
the law of the Emperor Claudius, which imposed limitations upon the 
"jus vitae et necis" (the right of life and death) which Roman slavery 
put into the hand of the master. But if the Professor should be so 
imprudent as to cite us to the slave code for evidence of its merciful 
provisions, he will, in so doing, authorize us to cite him to that code 
for evidence of the nature of slavery. This authority, however, 
he would not like to give us ; for he is unwilling to have slavery 
judged of by its own code. He insists, that il shall be judged of by 
that ideal system of slavery, which is lodged in his own brain, and 
which he can bring forth by parcels, to suit present occasions, as 
Mahomet produced the leaves of the Koran. 

Professor Hodge tells his readers, in substance, that the selling of 
men, as they are sold under the system of slavery, is to be classed 
with the cessions of territory, occasionally made by one sovereign to 
another ; and he would have the slave, who is sold from hand to 
hand, and from State to State, at the expense to his bleeding heart, of 
the disruption of its dearest ties, think his lot no harder than that of 
the inhabitant of Louisiana, who was passed without his will, from 
the jurisdiction of the French government to that of the United States. 

When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he 
must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, 
amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning. This 
is very evident in the case before us — especially, when now and then, 
old habits of thought and feeling break out, in spite of every effort to 
repress them, and the Professor is himself again, and discourses as 
manfully, as fearlessly, and as eloquently, as he ever had done before 

policy of the Southern slave system goes to provide it. How unreasonable is it to 
suppose, that they, who have conspired against a portion of their fellow-beings, and 
mutually pledged themselves to treat them as mere things — how unreasonable, I 
say, is it to suppose, that they would consent to put a man to death, on account of 
his treatment, in whatever way, of a mere thing ? Not long ago, I was informed 
by a highly respectable lawyer of the State of Georgia, that he had known a num- 
ber of attempts (attempts most probably but in form and name) to effect the con- 
viction of whites for their undoubted murder of slaves. But in every instance, the 
jurors perjured themselves, rather than consent that a man should be put to death, 
for the liberty he had taken in disposing of a thing. They had rather perjure them- 
selves, than by avenging the blood of a slave with that of a man, make a breach 
upon the policy of keeping the slave ignorant, that he has the nature, and conse- 
quently the rights, of a man. 



the slaveholders got. their hands upon him. It is not a little amusing 
to notice, that, although the burden of his article is to show that slavery 
is one of God's institutions, (what an undertaking for a Professor of 
Theology in the year 1836 !) he so far forgets the interests of his 
new friends and their expectations from him, as to admit on one page, 
that " the general principles of the gospel have destroyed domestic 
slavery throughout the greater part of Christendom ;" and on another, 
that " the South has to choose between emancipation, by the silent 
and holy influence of the gospel, or to abide the issue of a long con- 
tinued conflict against the laws of God." Whoever heard, until 
these strange times on which we have fallen, of any thing, which, to 
use the Professor's language about slavery, " it is in vain, to contend 
is sin, and yet profess reverence for the Scriptures," being at war 
with and destroyed by the principles of the gospel. What sad con- 
fusion of thought the pro-slavery influences, to which some great 
divines have yielded, have wrought in them ! 

I will proceed to argue, that the institution in the Southern States 
called " slavery," is radically unlike any form of servitude under 
which Jews were held, agreeably to the Divine will ; and also radi- 
cally unlike any form of servitude approved of God in the patriarchal 
families. 

1st. God does not contradict Himself. He is " without variable- 
ness or shadow of turning." He loves his word and has "magnified 
it above all his name." He commands his rational creatures to 
" search the Scriptures." He cannot, therefore, approve of a system 
which forbids the searching of them, and shuts out their light from the 
soul ; and which, by the confession of your own selves, turns men in 
this gospel land into heathen. He has written his commandment 
against adultery, and He cannot, therefore, approve of a system, 
which induces this crime, by forbidding marriage. The following 
extract from an opinion of the Attorney General of Maryland, shows 
some of the consequences of this " forbidding to marry." " A slave 
has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed. A 
slave is not admonished for incontinence, or punished for fornication 
or adultery ; never prosecuted for bigamy." Again, God has written 
his commandment, that children should honor their parents. How, 
then, can He approve of a system, which pours contempt on the re- 
lation of parent and child 1 Which subjects them to be forcibly separ- 
ated from each other, and that too, beyond the hope of reunion ? — 
under which parents are exposed and sold in the market-place along 
with horses and cattle 1 — under which they are stripped and lashed, 

2 



10 

and made to suffer those innumerable, and some of them, nameless 
indignities, that tend to generate in their children, who witness them, 
any feelings, rather than those of respect and honor, for parents thus 
degraded 1 Some of these nameless indignities are alluded to in a 
letter written to me from a slave state, in March, 1S33. "In this 
place," says the writer, " I find a regular and a much frequented slave 
market, where thousands are yearly sold like cattle to the highest 
bidder. It is the opinion of gentlemen here, that not far from five 
hundred thousand dollars are yearly paid in this place for negroes ; 
and at this moment, I can look from the window of my room and 
count six droves of from twenty to forty each, sitting in the market 
place for sale. This morning I witnessed the sale of twelve slaves, 
and I could but shudder at the language used and the liberties taken 
with the females !" 

2d. As a proof, that in the kinds of servitude referred to, God did 
not invest Abraham, or any other person with that absolute ownership 
of his fellow-men, which is claimed by Southern slaveholders — I would 
remark, that He has made man accountable to Himself; but slavery 
makes him accountable to, and a mere appendage to his fellow-man. 
Slavery substitutes the will of a fallible fellow-man for that infallible 
rule of action — the will of God. The slave, instead of being allowed 
to make it the great end of his existence to glorify God and enjoy 
Him for ever, is degraded from his exalted nature, which borders upon 
angelic dignity, to be, to do, and to suffer what a mere man bids him 
be, do, and suffer. 

The Southern slave would obey God in respect to marriage, and also 
to the reading and studying of His word. But this, as we have seen, 
is forbidden him. He may not marry ; nor may he read the Bible. 
Again, he would obey God in the duties of secret and social prayer. 
But he may not attend the prayer-meeting — certainly not that of his 
choice ; and instances are known, where the master has intruded 
upon the slave's secret audience with heaven, to teach him by the 
lash, or some other instrument of torture, that he would allow " no 
other God before" himself. 

Said Joseph Mason, an intelligent colored man, who was born and 
bred near Richmond, in Virginia, in reply to my question whether he 
and his fellow-slaves cared about their souls — " We did not trouble 
ourselves about our souls ; we were our masters' property and not 
our own ; under their and not our own control ; and we believed that 
our masters were responsible for our souls." This unconcern for 
their spiritual interests grew very naturally out of their relation to 



11 

their masters ; and were the relation ordained of God, the unconcern 
would, surely, be both philosophical and sinless. 

God cannot approve of a system of servitude, in which the master 
is guilty of assuming absolute power — of assuming God's place and 
relation towards his fellow-men. Were the master, in every case, a 
wise and good man — as wise and good as is consistent with this 
wicked and heaven-daring assumption on his part — the condition of 
the slave would it is true, be far more tolerable, than it now is. But 
even then, we should protest as strongly as ever against slavery ; for 
it would still be guilty of its essential wickedness of robbing a man 
of his right to himself, and of robbing God -of His right to him, and 
of putting these stolen rights into the hand of an erring mortal. Nay, 
if angels were constituted slaveholders, our objection to the relation 
would remain undiminished ; since there would still be the same rob- 
bery of which we now complain. 

But you will say, that I have overlooked the servitude in which the 
Jews held strangers and foreigners ; and that it is on this, more than 
any other, that you rely for your justification of slavery. I will say 
nothing now of this servitude ; but before I close this communica- 
tion, I will give my reasons for believing, that whatever was its 
nature, even if it were compulsory, it cannot be fairly pleaded in 
justification of slavery. 

After you shall have allowed, as you will allow, that slavery, as it 
exists, is at war with God, you will be likely to say, that the fault is 
not in the theory of it ; but in the practical departure from that theory ; 
that it is not the system, but the practice under it, which is at war 
with God. Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not 
with any theory of it. But to indulge you, we will look at the sys- 
tem of slavery, as it is presented to us, in the Iuws of the slave States ; 
and what do we find here ? Why, that the system is as bad as the 
practice under it. Here we find the most diabolical devices to keep 
millions of human beings in a state of heathenism — in the deepest 
ignorance and most loathsome pollution. But you will tell me, that 
I do not look far enough to find the true theory of slavery ; and that 
the cruelties and abominations, which the laws of the slave States have 
ingrafted on this theory, are not acknowledged by the good men in 
those States to be a part of the theory, Well, you shall have the 
benefit of this plea ; and I admit, for the sake of argument, that this 
theory of slavery, which lies far back, and out of sight of every thing 
visible and known about slavery, is right. And what does this admis- 
sion avail you ? It is slavery as it is — as it is seen and known, that 



n 

the abolitionists are contending against. But, say you, to induce our 
forbearance, " We good men at the South are restoring slavery, as 
fast as we can, to what it should be ; and we will soon make its err- 
ing practice quadrate with its perfect and sinless theory." Success 
to your endeavors ! But let me ask these good men, whether similar 
representations would avail to make them forbearing towards any 
other class of offenders ; and whether they would allow these offenders 
to justify the wickedness of their hands, by pleading the purity of 
their hearts. Suppose that I stand in court confessedly guilty of the 
crime of passing counterfeit money ; and that I ask for my acquittal 
on the ground, that, notwithstanding I am practically wrong, I am, 
nevertheless, theoretically right. " Believe me," I say, in tones of 
deep and unfeigned pathos, and with a corresponding pressure of my 
hand upon my heart, " that the principles within are those of the purest 
morality ; and that it is my faithful endeavor to bring my deportment, 
which, as you this day witness, is occasionally devious, into perfect 
conformity with my inward rectitude. My theory of honest and holy 
living is all that you could wish it to be. Be but patient, and you 
shall witness its beautiful exhibitions in my whole conduct." Now, 
you certainly would not have this plea turn to my advantage ; — why 
then expect that your similar plea should be allowed 1 

We must continue to judge of slavery by what it is, and not by 
what you tell us it will, or may be. Until its character be righteous, 
we shall continue to condemn it ; but when you shall have brought it 
back to your sinless and beautiful theory of it, it will have nothing to 
fear from the abolitionists. There are two prominent reasons, how- 
ever, for believing that you will never present Southern slavery to us 
in this lovely character, the mere imagination of which is so dear to 
you. The first is, that you are doing nothing to this end. It is an 
indisputable fact that Southern slavery is continually getting wider and 
wider from God, and from an innocent theory of servitude ; and the 
" good men at the South," of whom we have spoken, are not only 
doing nothing to arrest this increasing divergency, but they are act- 
ually favoring it. The writings of your Dews, and Baxters, and 
Plummers, and Postells, and Andersons, and the proceedings of your 
ecclesiastical bodies, abundantly show this. Never, and the assertion 
is borne out by your statute books, as well as other evidences, has 
Southern slavery multiplied its abominations so rapidly, as within the 
last ten years ; and never before had the Southern Church been so 
much engaged to defend and perpetuate these abominations. The 
other of these reasons for believing that Southern slavery will nevei 



13 

be conformed to your beau ideal of slavery, in which it is presupposed 
there are none but principles of righteousness, is, that on its first con- 
tact with these principles, it would " vanish into thin air," leaving 
" not a wreck behind." In proof of this, and I need not cite any other 
case, it would be immediate death to Southern slavery to concede to 
its subjects, God's institution of marriage ; and hence it is, that its 
code forbids marriage. The rights of the husband in the wife, and 
of the wife in the husband, and of parents in their children, would 
stand directly in the way of that traffic in human flesh, which is the 
very life-blood of slavery ; and the assumptions of the master would, 
at every turn and corner, be met and nullified by these rights ; since 
all his commands to the children of these servants (for now they 
should no longer be called slaves) would be in submission to the 
paramount authority of the parents.* And here, sir, you and I might 
bring our discussion to a close, by my putting the following questions 
to you, both of which your conscience would compel you to answer 
in the affirmative. 

1st. Is not Southern slavery guilty of a most heaven-daring crime, 
in substituting concubinage for God's institution of marriage? 

2d. Would not that slavery, and also every theory and modifica- 
tion of slavery, for which you may contend, come speedily to nought, 
if their subjects were allowed to marry? Slavery, being an abuse, is 
incapable of reformatio.!. " Zk dies, not only when you aim a fatal blow 
at its life principle — its foundation, doctrine of man's right to property 
in man| — but it dies as surely, when you prune it of its manifold in- 
cidents of pollution and irreligion. 

But it would be treating you indecorously to stop you at this stage 
of the discussion, before we are a third of the way through your book, 
and thus deny a hearing to the remainder of it. We will proceed to 

* I am aware that Professor Hodge asserts, that " slavery may exist without 
those laws which interfere with their (the slaves) marital or parental right." Now, 
this is a point of immense importance in the discussion of the question, whether 
slavery is sinful ; and I, therefore, respectfully ask him either to retract the asser- 
tion, or to prove its correctness. Ten thousands of his fellow-citizens, to whom the 
assertion is utterly incredible, unite with me in this request. If he can show, that 
slavery does not " interfere with marital or parental rights," they will cease to oppose 
it. Their confident belief is, that slavery and marriage, whether considered in the 
light of a civil contract, or a scriptural institution, are entirely incompatible with 
each other. 

f I mean by this phrase, " right to property in man," a right to hold man as pro* 
perty; and I do not see with what propriety certain writers construe it to mean, a 
property in the mere services of a man. 



14 

what you say of the slavery which existed in the time of the New 
Testament writers. Before we do so, however, let me call your at- 
tention to a few of the specimens of very careless reasoning in that 
part of your book, which we have now gone over. They may serve 
to inspire you with a modest distrust of the soundness of other parts 
of your argument. 

After concluding that Abraham was a slaveholder, you quote the 
following language from the Bible ; " Abraham obeyed my voice and 
kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws." 
Tou then inquire, " How could this be true of Abraham, holding as 
he did, until he was an old man, more slaves than any man in Mis- 
sissippi or Louisiana ?" To be consistent with your design in quot- 
ing this passage, you must argue from it, that Abraham was perfect. 
But this he was not ; and, therefore, your quotation is vain. Again, 
if the slaveholder would quiet his conscience with the supposition, 
that " Abraham held more slaves than any man in Mississippi or 
Louisiana," let him remember, that he had also more concubines 
(Gen. 25 : 6) " than any man in Mississippi or Louisiana ;" and, if 
Abraham's authority be in the one case conclusive for slaveholding, 
equally so must it be in the other, for concubinage. 

Perhaps, in saying that " Abraham had more concubines than any 
man in Mississippi or Louisiana," I have done injustice to the spirit 
of propagation prevailing amongst the gowfrefnen of those States. It 
may be, that some of your planters quite distance the old patriarch in 
obedience to the command to " multiply and replenish the earth." I 
am correctly informed, that a planter in Virginia, who counted, I 
know not how many slaves upon his plantation, confessed on his 
death-bed, that his licentiousness had extended to every adult female 
amongst them. This planter was a near relative of the celebrated 
Patrick Henry. It may be, that you have planters in J Mississippi and 
Louisiana, who avail themselves to the extent that he did, of the 
power which slaveholding gives to pollute and destroy. The hun- 
dreds of thousands of mulattoes, who constitute the Southern com- 
mentary on the charge, that the abolitionists design amalgamation, 
bear witness that this planter was not singular in his propensities. I 
do not know what you can do with this species of your population. 
Besides, that it is a standing and deep reproach on Southern chastity, 
it is not a little embarrassing and puzzling to those who have received 
the doctrine, that the descendants of Africa amongst us must be re- 
turned to the land of their ancestors. How the poor mulatto shall 
be disposed of, under this doctrine, between the call which Africa 



15 

makes for him, on the one hand, and that which some state of Europe 
sends out for him on the other, is a problem more difficult of solution 
than that which the contending mothers brought before the matchless 
wisdom of Solomon. 

In the paragraph, which relates to the fourth and tenth command- 
ments, there is another specimen of your loose reasoning. You say, 
that the language, " In it (the Sabbath) thou shalt do no work, thou, nor 
thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man servant, nor thy maid servant," 
" recognises the authority of the master over the servant." I grant, 
that it does : but does it at all show, that these servants were slaves ? 
Does it recognise any more authority than the master should exer- 
cise over his voluntary servarrts ? Should not the head of a family 
restrain all his servants, as well the voluntary as the involuntary, 
from unnecessary labor on the Sabbath ? You also say, that the tenth 
commandment " recognizes servants as the property of their masters." 
But how does it appear from the language of this commandment, that 
the man servant and maid servant are property any more than the 
wife is? We will proceed, however, to the third section of your 
book. 

Your acquaintance with history has enabled you to show some of 
the characteristics and fruits of Greek and Roman slavery. You 
state the facts, that the subjects of this slavery were " absolutely the 
property of their masters" — that they " were used like dogs" — that 
" they were forbidden to learn any liberal art or perform any act worthy 
of their masters" — that "once a day they received a certain number of 
stripes for fear they should forget they were slaves" — that, at one time, 
" sixty thousand of them in Sicily and Italy were chained and confined 
to work in dungeons" — that " in Rome there was a continual market 
for slaves," and that " the slaves were commonly exposed for sale 
naked" — " that, when old, they were turned away," and that too by a 
master, highly esteemed for his superior virtues, to starve to death" 
— that they were thrown into ponds to be food for fish — that they 
were in the city of Athens near twenty times as numerous as free 
persons — that there were in the Roman Empire sixty millions of 
slaves to twenty millions of freemen — and that many of the Romans 
had five thousand, some ten thousand, and others twenty thousand. 

And now, for what purpose is your recital of these facts? — not, 
for its natural effect of awakening, in your readers, the utmost abhor- 
rence of slavery : — no — but for the strange purpose (the more strange 
for being in the breast of a minister of the gospel) of showing youi* 
leaders, that even Greek and Roman slavery was innocent, and 



16 

agreeable to God's will; and that, horrid as are the fruits you describe, 
the tree, which bore them, needed but to be dug about and pruned — 
not to be cut down. This slavery is innocent, you insist, because 
the New Testament does not show, that it was specifically con- 
demned by the Apostles. By the same logic, the races, the games, 
the dramatic entertainments, and the shows of gladiators, which 
abounded in Greece and Rome, were, likewise, innocent, because the 
New Testament does not show a specific condemnation of them by 
the apostles.* But, although the New Testament does not show 
such condemnation, does it necessarily follow,. that they were silent, 
in relation to these sins? Or, because the New Testament does not 
specifically condemn Greek and Roman slavery, may we, therefore, 
infer, that the Apostles did not specifically condemn it? Look 
through the published writings of many of the eminent divines, who 
have lived in modern times, and have written and published much 
for the instruction of the churches, and you will not find a line in 
them against gambling or theatres or the slave-trade ; — in some of 
them, not a line against the very common sin of drunkenness. Think 
you, therefore, that they never spoke or wrote against these things 1 
It would be unreasonable to expect to find, in print, their sentiments 
against all, even of the crying sins of their times. But how much 
more unreasonable is it to expect to find in the few pages of the 
Apostles' published letters, the whole of which can be read in a few 
hours, their sentiments in relation to all the prominent sins of the age 
in which they lived ! And far greater still is the unreasonableness of 
setting them down, as favorable to all practices which these letters do 
not specifically condemn. 

It may be, that the Saviour and the Apostles, in the course of their 
teachings, both oral and written, did specify sins to a far greater 
extent, than they are supposed to have done. It may be, that their 
followers had much instruction, in respect to the great sin of slavery. 
We must bear in mind, that but a very small part of that Divine in- 
struction, which, on the testimony of an Apostle, " the world itself 
could not contain if written," has come down to us. Of the writ- 



+ Prof. Hodge says, if the apostles did abstain from declaring slavery to be sinful, 
" it must have been, because they did not consider it as, in itself, a crime. No 
other solution of their conduct is consistent with their truth or fidelity." But he 
believes that they did abstain from so doing ; and he believes this, on the same 
evidence, on which he believes, that they abstained from declaring the races, games, 
&c, above enumerated, to be sinful. His own mode of reasoning, therefore, brings 
him unavoidably to the conclusion, that these races, games, &c, were not sinful. 



17 

mgs of our Saviour we have nothing. Of those of his Apostles a very 
small part. It is probable, that, during his protracted ministry, the 
learned apostle to the Gentiles wrote many letters on religious sub- 
jects to individuals and to churches. So also of the immense amount 
of instruction, which fell from the lips of the Apostles, but very little 
is preserved. It was Infinite Wisdom, however, which determined 
the size of the New, as well as of the Old Testament, and of what 
kinds and portions of the Saviour's and the Apostles' instructions it 
should consist. For obvious considerations, it is made up, in a great 
measure, of general truths and propositions. Its limited size, if no 
other reason, accounts for this. But, these general truths and pro- 
positions are as comprehensive as the necessity of the case requires ; 
and, carried out into all their suitable applications, they leave no sin 
unforbidden. Small as is the New Testament, it is as large as we 
need. It instructs us in relation to all our duties. It is as full on 
the subject of slavery, as is necessary ; and, if we will but obey its 
directions, that bear on this subject, and " love one another," and 
love our neighbors as ourselves, and, a3 we would that men should 
do to us, do " also to them likewise," and " remember them, that are 
in bonds as bound with them," and " give unto servants, that which 
is just and equal" — not a vestige of this abomination will remain. 

For the sake of the argument, I will admit, that the Apostles made 
no specific attack on slavery ;* and that they left it to be reached and 

* This is no small admission in the face of the passage, in the first chapter of 
Timothy, which particularizes manstealing, as a violation of the law of God. I 
believe all scholars will admit, that one of the crimes referred to by the Apostle, is 
kidnapping. But is not kidnapping an integral and most vital part of the system 
of slavery ? And is not the slaveholder guilty of this crime ? Does he not, indeed, 
belong to a class of kidnappers stamped with peculiar meanness ? The pirate, on 
the coast of Africa, has to cope with the strength and adroitness of mature years. 
To get his victim into his clutches is a deed of daring and of peril demanding no 
little praise, upon the principles of the world's "code of honor." But the proud 
chivalry of the South is securely employed in kidnapping newborn infants. The 
pirate, in the one case, soothes his conscience with the thought, that the bloody 
savages merit no better treatment, than they are receiving at his hands : — but the 
pirate, in the other, can have no such plea — for they, whom he kidnaps, are un- 
tainted with crime. 

And what better does it make the case for you, if we adopt the translation of 
" men stealers ?" Far better, you will say, for, on the authority of Othello himself, 



"He that is robb'd 

Let him not know it, and he's not robbed at all." 

But, your authority is not conclusive. The crime of the depredation is none the less, 
because the subject is ignorant or unconscious of it. It is true, tjie slave, who 

8 



18 

overthrown, provided it be sinful, by the general principles and in 
structions which they had inculcated. But you will say, that it was 
their practice, in addition to inculcating such principles and instruc- 
tions, to point out sins and reprove them : — and you will ask, with 
great pertinence and force, why they did not also point out and re- 
prove slavery, which, in the judgment of abolitionists, is to be classed 
with the most heinous sins. I admit, that there is no question ad- 
dressed to abolitionists, which, after the admission I have made for 
them, it is less easy to answer ; and I admit further, that they are 
bound to answer it. I will proceed to assign what to me appear to 
be some of the probable reasons, why the Apostles specified the sins 
of lying, covetousness, stealing, &c, and, agreeably to the admission, 
which lays me under great disadvantage, did not specify slavery. 

1st. The book of Acts sets forth the fundamental doctrines and 
requirements of Christianity. It is to the letters of the Apostles we 
are to look for extended specifications of right and wrong affections, 
and right and wrong practices. Why do these letters omit to specify 
the sin of slaveholding? Because they were addressed to professing 
Christians exclusively ; who, far more emphatically then than now, 
were " the base things of the world," and were in circumstances to be 
slaves, rather than slaveholders. Doubtless, there were many slaves 
amongst them — but I cannot admit, that there were slaveholders. 
There is not the least probability, that slaveholding was a prevalent 
sin amongst primitive Christians.* Instructions to them on that sin 
might have been almost as superfluous, as would be lectures on the 
sin of luxury, addressed to the poor Greenland disciples, whose 
poverty compels them to subsist on filthy oil. No one, acquainted 
with the history of their lives, believes that the Apostles were slave- 
holders. They labored, " working with (their) own hands." The 

never possessed liberty — who was kidnapped at his birth — may not grieve, under 
the absence of it, as he does, from whose actual and conscious possession it had 
been violently taken : but the robbery is alike plain, and is coupled with a mean- 
ness, in the one case, which does not disgrace it in the other. 

* How strongly does the following extract from the writings of the great and 
good Augustine, who lived in the fourth century, argue, that slaveholding was not 
a prevalent sin amongst primitive Christians ! 

"Non oportet Christianum possidere servum quomodo equum aut argentum. 
duis dicere audeat ut vestimentum eum debere contemni? Hominem namque 
homo tamquam seipsum diligere debet cui ab omnium Domino, ut inimicos diligat, 
imperatur." A Christian ovght not to hold his servant as he does his horse or his 
money. Who dares say that he should be thought as lightly of as a garment ? For 
man, whom the Lord of ali has commanded to love his enemies, should love his fellow 
man as himself. 



19 

supposition, that they were slaveholders, is inconsistent with their 
practice, and with the tenor of their instructions to others on the duty 
of manual labor. But if the Apostles were not slaveholders, why 
may we suppose, that their disciples were ? At the South, it is " like 
people, like priest," in this matter. There, the minister of the gospel 
thinks, that he has as good right to hold slaves, as has his parishioner : 
and your Methodists go so far, as to say, that even a bishop has as 
good right, as any other person, to have slaves 

to fan him while he sleeps, 



And tremble when he wakes." 

Indeed, they already threaten to separate from their Northern brethren, 
unless this right be conceded. But have we not other and conclu- 
sive evidence, that primitive Christians were not slaveholders 1 We 
will cite a few passages from the Bible to show, that it was not the 
will of the Apostles to have their disciples hold manual labor in dis- 
repute, as it is held, in all slaveholding communities. " Do your 
own business, and work with your own hands, as we commanded 
you." " For this we commanded you, that, if any would not work, 
neither should he eat." " Let him that stole, steal no more ; but 
rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, 
that he may have to give to him that needeth." In bringing the 
whole verse into this last quotation, I may have displeased you. I 
am aware, that you slaveholders proudly and indignantly reject the 
applicableness to yourselves of the first phrase in this verse, and 
also of the maxim, that " the partaker of stolen goods is as bad as 
the thief." I am aware, that you insist, that the kidnapping of a man, 
or getting possession of him, after he has been kidnapped, is not to be 
compared, if indeed it can be properly called theft at all, with the crime 
of stealing a thing. It occurs to me, that if a shrewd lawyer had you 
on trial for theft, he would say, that you were estopped from going into 
this distinction between a man and a thing, inasmuch as, by your own 
laws, the slave is expressly declared to be a chattel — is expressly 
elevated into a thing. He would say, however competent it may be 
for others to justify themselves on the ground, that it was but a man, 
and not a thing, they had stolen ; your own statutes, which, with 
magic celerity, convert stolen men into things, make such a plea, on 
your part, utterly inadmissible. He would have you as fast, as though 
the stolen goods, in your hands, were a bushel of wheat, or some 
other important thing, instead of a mere man. 

But, if you are not yet convinced that primitive Christians were not 



20 

slaveholders, let me cite another passage to show you, how very iin 
probable it is, that they stood in this capacity : — " all, that believed, 
had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and 
parted them to all men, as every man had need." Now I do not say, 
that all the primitive believers did so. But if a portion of them did, 
and met with the Apostles' approbation in it, is it at all probable, that 
a course, so diverse from it, as that of slaveholding in the Church, met 
likewise with their approbation 1 

2d. I go on to account for the Apostles' omission to specify 
slavery. 

Criminality is not always obvious, in proportion to its extent. The 
sin of the traffic in intoxicating liquors, was, until the last few years, 
almost universally unfelt and unperceived. But now, we meet with 
men, who, though it was " in all good conscience," that they were 
once engaged in it, would not resume it for worlds ; and who see 
more criminality, in taking money from a fellow man, in exchange for 
the liquor which intoxicates him, than in simple theft. However it 
may be with others, in this employment, they now see, that, for them 
to traffic in intoxicating liquors, would be to stain themselves with the 
twofold crime of robbery and murder. How is it, that good men 
ever get into this employment X — and, under what influences and by 
what process of thought, do they come, to the determination to aban- 
don it? The former is accounted for, by the fact, that they grow up 
— have their education — their moral and intellectual training — in the 
midst of a public opinion, and even of laws also, which favor and sanc- 
tion the employment. The latter is accounted for, by the fact, that 
they are brought, in the merciful providence of God, to observe and 
study and understand the consequences of their employment — espe- 
cially on those who drink their liquor — the liquor which they sell 
or make, or, with no less criminality, furnish the materials for making. 
These consequences they find to be " evil, only evil, and that con- 
tinually." They find, that this liquor imparts no benefit to them who 
drink it, but tends to destroy, and, oftentimes, does destroy, their 
healths and lives. To continue, therefore, in an employment in 
which they receive their neighbor's money, without returning him an 
equivalent, or any portion of an equivalent, and, in which they expose 
both his body and soul to destruction, is to make themselves, in their 
own judgments, virtually guilty of theft and murder. 

Thus it is in the case of a national war, waged for conquest. 
Christians have taken part in it ; and, because they were blinded by 
u wrong education, and were acting in the name of their country and 



21 

under the impulses of patriotism, they never suspected that they were 
doing the devil, instead of " God, service." But when, in the kind 
providence of God, one of these butchers of their fellow beings is 
brought to pause and consider his ways, and to resolve his enormous 
and compound sin into its elements of wickedness, — into the lies, 
theft, covetousness, adultery, murder, and what not of crime, which 
enter into it, — he is amazed that he has been so " slow of heart to 
believe," and abandon the iniquity of his deeds. 

What I have said to show that Christians, even in enlightened and 
gospelized lands, may be blind to the great wickedness of certain 
customs and institutions, serves to introduce the remark, that there 
were probably some customs and institutions, in the time of the 
Apostles, on which it would have been even worse than lost labor for 
them to make direct attacks. Take, for example, the kind of war 
of which we have been speaking. If there are reasons why the 
modern Christian can be insensible to the sin of it, there are far 
stronger reasons why the primitive Christian could be. If the light 
and instruction which have been accumulating for eighteen centuries, 
are scarcely sufficient to convince Christians of its wickedness, is it 
reasonable to suppose that, at the commencement of this long period, 
they could have been successfully taught it? Consider, that at that 
time the literature and sentiment of the world were wholly on the side 
of war ; and especially, consider how emphatically the authority of 
civil government and of human law was in favor of its rightfulness. 
Now, to how great an extent such authority covers over and sanctifies 
sin, may be inferred from the fact, that there are many, who, notwith- 
standing they believe slavery to be a most Heaven-daring sin, yet, 
because it is legalized and under the wing of civil government, would 
not have it spoken against. Even Rev. Dr. Miller, in certain reso- 
lutions which he submitted to the last General Assembly, indicated 
his similar reverence for human laws ; and the lamented Dr. Rice 
distinctly recognises, in his letter to Mr. Maxwell, the doctrine that 
the Church is bound to be quiet about every sin which the civil govern- 
ment adopts and whitewashes. That the Christian Spectator should 
indorse the Doctor's sentiments on this point is still more worthy of 
remark than that he should utter them. Indeed, I judge from what 
you say on the 68th and 69th pages of your book, that you are your- 
self opposed to calling in question the morality of that which civil 
government approves. But, to doubt the infallibility of civil govern- 
ment, — to speak against Ca;sar, — was manifestly held to be quite as 
presumptuous in the time of the Apostles as it is now. 



Another reason why an Apostle would probably have deemed il 
hopeless to attempt to persuade his disciples, immediately and directly, 
of the sin of war, is to be found in the fact of their feeble and dis- 
torted perception of truth and duty. We, whose advantage it is to 
have lived all our days in the light of the gospel, and whose ancestors, 
from time immemorial, had the like precious advantage, can hardly 
conceive how very feeble and distorted was that perception. But, 
consider for a moment who those disciples were. They had, most 
of them, but just been taken out of the gross darkness and filth of 
heathenism. In reading accounts which missionaries give of con- 
verted heathen — of such, even, as have for ten, fifteen, or twenty 
years, been reputed to be pious — you are, doubtless, often surprised 
to find how grossly erroneous are their moral perceptions. Their 
false education still cleaves to them. They are yet, to a great extent, 
in the mould of a corrupted public opinion ; and, as far from having 
a clear discernment of moral truth, as were the partially unsealed 
eyes which saw " men, as trees, walking." The first letter to the 
Church at Corinth, proves that the new principles implanted in its 
members had not yet purged out the leaven of their old wickedness ; 
and that their conceptions of Christian purity and conduct were sadly 
defective. As it was with the Corinthian Christians, so was it to a 
great extent with the other Christians of that age. Nov/, if the 
Apostles did not directly teach the primitive believers that wars, and 
theatres, and games, and slavery, are sinful, it is because they thought 
it more fit to exercise their ignorant pupils chiefly in the mere alpha- 
bet and syllables of Christianity. (Acts xv, 28, 29.) The construc- 
tion of words and sentences would naturally follow. The rudiments 
of the gospel, if once possessed by them, would be apt to lead them 
on to greater attainments. Indeed, the love, peace, truth, and other 
elements of holy living inculcated by the Apostles, would, if turned 
to all proper account, be fatal to every, even the most gigantic, sys- 
tem of wickedness. Having these elements in their minds and 
hearts, they would not fail of condemning the great and compound 
sin of war whenever they should be led to take it up, examine it, 
resolve it into its constituent parts, and lay these parts for comparison, 
by the side of those elements. But, such an advance was hardly to 
be expected from many of these heathen converts during the brief 
period in which they enjoyed Apostolic instruction ; and it is but too 
probable, that most of them died in great ignorance of the sin of 
national wars. Converts from the heathen, in the present age, when 



23 

conviction of the sinfulness of war is spreading in different parts of 
Christendom, would be more likely to imbibe correct views of it. 

The Apostles " fed with milk " before they fed with meat, as did 
our Saviour, who declared, " I have yet many things to say unto you, 
but ye cannot bear them now." In every community, the foundation 
principles of righteousness must be laid, before there can be fulcrums 
for the levers to be employed in overthrowing the sins which prevail in it. 

You will doubtless, then, agree with me, that it is not probable that 
the Apostles taught their heathen converts, directly and specifically, 
the sinfulness of war. But slaves, in that age, with the exception of 
the comparative few who were reduced to slavery on account of the 
crimes of which they had been judicially convicted, were the spoils 
of war. How often in that age, as was most awfully the fact, on 
the final destruction of Jerusalem, were the slave-markets of the 
world glutted by the captives of war ! Until, therefore, they should 
be brought to see the sinfulness of war, how could they see the sin- 
fulness of so direct and legitimate a fruit of it as slavery ? — and, if 
the Apostles thought their heathen converts too weak to be instructed 
in the sinfulness of war, how much more would they abstain from 
instructing them, directly and specifically, in the sin of slavery ! 

3d. In proceeding with my reasons why the Apostles did not 
extend their specification of sins to slavery, I remark, that it is appa- 
rent from the views we have taken, and from others which might have 
been taken, that nothing would have been gained by their making 
direct and specific attacks on the institutions of the civil governments 
under which they lived. Indeed, much might have been lost by their 
doing so. Weak converts, with still many remains of heathenism 
about them, might in this wise have been incurably prejudiced against 
truths, which, by other modes of teaching, — by general and indirect 
instructions, — would probably have been lodged in their minds. And 
there is another point of view in which vastly more, even their lives, 
might have been lost, by the Apostles making the direct and specific 
attacks referred to. I know that you ridicule the idea of their con- 
sulting their personal safety. But what right have you to do so? 
They did, on many occasions, consult the security of their lives. 
They never perilled them needlessly, and through a presumptuous 
reliance on God. It is the devil, who, in a garbled quotation from 
the Scriptures, lays down, in unlimited terms, the proposition, that 
God will keep his children. But, God promises them protection only 
when they are in their own proper ways. The Saviour himself con- 
sulted the safety of his life, until his "time" had "full come;" and 



24 

his command to his Apostles was, " when they persecute you in this 
city, flee ye into another." If you suppose me to admit for a mo- 
ment, that regard for the safety of their lives ever kept them from 
the way of their duty, you are entirely mistaken ; and, if you con- 
tinue to assert, in the face of my reasoning to the contrary, that on 
the supposition of the sinfulness of slavery, their omission to make 
direct and specific attacks on it would have been a failure of their 
duty, then I can only regret that this reasoning has had no more 
influence upon you. 

I observe that Professor Hodge agrees with you, that if slavery is 
sin, it would have been specifically attacked by the Apostles at any 
hazard to their lives. This is his conclusion, because they did not 
hesitate to specify and rebuke idolatry. Here is another of the Pro- 
fessor's sophisms. The fact, that the Apostles preached against 
idolatry, is no reason at all why, if slavery is sin, they would have 
preached against that also. On the one hand, it is not conceivable 
that the gospel can be preached where there is idolatry, without 
attacking it : for, in setting forth the true God to idolaters, the 
preacher must denounce their false gods. On the other hand, gos- 
pel sermons can be preached without number, and the true God pre- 
sented, not only in a nation of idolaters, but elsewhere, without one 
allusion being made to such crying sins as slavery, lewdness, and 
intemperance. 

In the same connexion, Professor Hodge makes the remark : 
" We do not expect them (our missionaries) to refrain from de- 
nouncing the institutions of the heathen as sinful, because they are 
popular, or intimately interwoven with society." If he means by 
this language, that it is the duty of missionaries on going into a 
heathen nation, to array themselves against the civil government, and 
to make direct and specific attacks on its wicked nature and wicked 
administration, then is he at issue, on this point, with the whole 
Christian public ; and, if he does not mean this, or what amounts to 
this, I do not see how his remark will avail any thing, in his attempt 
to show that the Apostles made such attacks on whatever sinful 
institutions came under their observation. 

What I have said on a former page shows sufficiently how fit it is 
for missionaries to the heathen, more especially in the first years of 
their efforts among them, to labor to instruct their ignorant pupils in 
the elementary principles of Christianity, rather than to call their 
attention to the institutions of civil government, the sinfulness of 
which they would not be able to perceive until they had been grounded 



25 

m those elementary principles ; and the sinfulness of which, more 
than of any thing else, their prejudices would forbid them to suspect. 
Another reason why the missionary to the heathen should not directly, 
and certainly not immediately, assail their civil governments, is that 
he would thereby arouse their jealousies to a pitch fatal to his 
influence, his usefulness, and most probably his life ; and another 
reason is, that this imprudence would effectually close the door, for 
a long time, against all efforts, even the most judicious, to spread the 
gospel amongst a people so needlessly and greatly prejudiced against 
it by an unwise and abrupt application of its principles. For instance, 
what folly and madness it would be for our missionaries to Burmah, 
to make a direct assault on the political institutions of that country ! 
How fatal would it be to their lives, and how incalculably injurious 
to the cause entrusted to their hands ! And, if this can be said of 
them, after they have spent ten, fifteen, and twenty years, in efforts 
to bring tnat portion of the heathen world to a knowledge and love 
of the truth, how much more emphatically could it be said if they 
had been in the field of their labors but three or four years ! And 
yet, even this short space of time exceeds the average period of the 
Apostles' labor among those different portions of the heathen world 
which they visited ; — labor, too, it must be remembered, not of the 
whole, nor even of half of " the twelve." 

That the Apostles could not have made direct attacks on the insti- 
tutions of the Roman government, but at the expense of their lives, 
is not to be doubted. Our Saviour well knew how fatal was the 
jealousy of that government to the man who was so unhappy as to 
have excited it ; and he accordingly avoided the excitement of it, as 
far as practicable and consistent. His ingenious and beautiful dis- 
position of the question, " Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or 
not," is among the instances, in which He studied to shun the dis- 
pleasure of the civil government. Pilate gave striking evidence of 
his unwillingness to excite the jealousy of his government, when, 
every other expedient to induce him to consent to the Saviour's death 
having failed, the bare charge, utterly unproven and groundless, that 
the Divine prisoner had put forth pretensions, interfering with Caesar's 
rights, availed to procure His death-warrant from the hands of that 
truth-convicted, but man-fearing governor. Had it not availed, Pilate 
would have been exposed to the suspicion of disloyalty to his govern- 
ment ; and so perilous was this suspicion, that he was ready, at any 
expense to his conscience and sense of justice, to avoid incurring it. 

A direct attack on Roman slavery, as it would have called in 

4 



26 

question the rightfulness of war — the leading policy of the Roman 
government — would, of course, have been peculiarly perilous to its 
presumptuous author. No person could have made this attack, and 
lived ; or, if possibly he might have escaped the vengeance of the 
government, do we not know too much of the deadly wrath of slave- 
holders, to believe that he could have also escaped the summary 
process of Lynch law 1 If it be at the peril of his life that a Northern 
man travels in the Southern States, — and that, too, whether he do or 
do not say a word about slavery, or even whether he be or be not an 
abolitionist ; — if your leading men publicly declare, that it is your 
religious duty to put to an immediate death, whenever they come 
within your power, those who presume to say that slavery is sin (and 
such a declaration did a South Carolina gentleman make on the floor 
of congress, respecting the inconsiderable person who is addressing 
you) ; — and, if your professing Christians, not excepting ministers 
of the gospel, thirst for the blood of abolitionists,* as I will abund- 

* I will relate an incident, to show what a fiend even woman, gentle, lovely 
woman, may become, after she has fallen under the sway of the demon of slavery. 
Said a lady of Savannah, on a visit in the city of New York, " I wish he (Rev. 
Dr. Samuel H. Cox) would come to Savannah. I should love to see him tarred 
and feathered, and his head cut off" and carried on a pole around Savannah." This 
lady is a professing Christian. Her language stirs me up to retaliate upon her, and 
to express the wish that she would come to the town, and even to the dwelling, 
in which Dr. Cox resides. She would find that man of God — that man of sancti- 
fied genius — as glad to get his enemies into his hands, as she would be to get him 
into the hands of his enemies: — not, however, for the purpose of disgracing and 
decapitating them, but, that he might pour out upon them the forgiveness and love 
of his generous and abolitionized heart. In the city of New York there are thou- 
sands of whole-souled abolitionists. What a striking testimony is it, in behalf of 
their meekness and forbearance, when a southern fury is perfectly secure, in belch- 
ing out such words of wrath in the midst of them ! We abolitionists never love 
our principles better, than when we see the slaveholder feeling safe amongst us. 
No man has been more abusive of us than Governor McDuffie ; and yet, were he 
to travel in the Northern States, he would meet with no unkindness at the hands of 
any abolitionist. On the other hand, let it be known to the governor, that he has 
within his jurisdiction a prominent abolitionist — one, whose heart of burning love 
has made him specially anxious to persuade the unfortunate slaveholder to be just 
to himself, to his fellow men, and to his God, — and the governor, true to the horrid 
sentiments of his famous message, would advise that he be " put to death without 
benefit of clergy." Let slaveholders say what they will about our blood-thirsti- 
ness, there is not one of them who fears to put himself in our power. The many 
of them, who have been beneath my roof, and the roofs of other abolitionists, have 
manifested their confidence in our kindness. Were a stranger to the institution of 
slavery to learn, in answer to his inquiries, that "an abolitionist" is "an outlaw 
amongst slaveholders," and that " a slaveholder " is " the kindly entertained 
gueet of abolitionists," — here would be a puzzle indeed. But the solution of it 



27 

antly show, if you require proof; — if, in a gospel land, all this be 
so, then I put it to your candor, whether it can reasonably be sup- 
posed that the Apostles would have been allowed to attack slavery in 
the midst of heathen slaveholders. Why it is that slaveholders will 
not allow a word to be breathed against slavery, I cannot, perhaps, 
correctly judge. Abolitionists think that this unwillingness denotes 
that man is unfit for absolute power over his fellow men. They 
think as unfavorably of the influence of this power on the slave- 
holder, as your own Jefferson did. They think that it tends to make 
him impatient of contradiction, self-willed, supercilious, cruel, mur- 
derous, devilish ; and they think that they can establish this opinion, 
not by the soundest philosophy only, but by the pages of many of 
your own writers, and by those daffy scenes of horrid brutality which 
make the Southern States, in the sight both of God and man, one of 
the most frightful and loathsome portions of the world — of the whole 
world — barbarous as well as civilized. 

I need not render any more reasons why the Apostles did not spe- 
cifically attack slavery ; but I will reply to a question, which I am 
sure will be upon your lips all the time you are reading those I have 
rendered. This question is, " If the Apostles did not make such an 
attack on slavery, why may the American abolitionists V I answer, 
that the difference between the course of the abolitionists and of the 
Apostles, in this matter, is justified by the difference in their circum- 
stances. Professor Hodge properly says, that our course should be 
like theirs, M unless it can be shown that their circumstances were so 
different from ours, as to make the rule of duty different in the two 
;ases." And he as properly adds, "the obligation to point out and 
establish this difference rests upon the abolitionists." 

The reasons I have given, why the Apostles did not directly attack 
slavery, do not apply to the abolitionists. The arm of civil power does 
not restrain us from attacking it. To open our lips against the policy 
and institutions of civil government is not certain death. A despotic 
government restricted the efforts of the Apostles to do good. But 
we live under governments which afford the widest scope for exer- 
tions to bless our fellow men and honor God. Now, if we may not 
avail ourselves of this advantage, simply because the Apostles did 
not have it to avail themselves of, then whatever other interests may 
prosper under a republican government, certain it is, that the cause 

would not fail to be as honorable to the persecuted man of peace, aa it would be 
disgraceful to the bloody advocate and executioner of Lynch law. 



28 

of truth and righteousness is not to be benefited by it. Far better 
never to have had our boasted form of government, if, whilst u 
extends the freedom and multiplies the facilities of the wicked, it 
relieves the righteous of none of the restrictions of a despotic govern- 
ment. Again, there is a religious conscience all over this land, and 
an enlightened and gospel sense of right and wrong ; on which we 
can and do (as in your Introduction you concede is the fact) bring 
our arguments against slavery to bear with mighty power. But, on 
the other hand, the creating of such a conscience and such a sense, 
in the heathen and semi-heathen amongst whom they lived and labored, 
was the first, and appropriate, and principal work of the Apostles. 
To employ, therefore, no other methods for the moral and religious 
improvement of the people of the United States, than were employed 
by the Apostles for that of the people of the Roman empire, is as 
absurd as it would be to put the highest and lowest classes in a school 
to the same lessons ; or a raw apprentice to those higher branches of 
his trade which demand the skill of an experienced workman. 

I am here reminded of what Professor Hodge says were the means 
relied on by the Saviour and Apostles for abolishing slavery. " It 
was," says he, " by teaching the true nature, dignity, equality, and 
destiny of men ; by inculcating the principles of justice and love ; 
and by leaving these principles to produce their legitimate effects in 
ameliorating the condition of all classes of society." I would not 
speak disparagingly of such a course of instruction ; so far from it, 
I am ready to admit that it is indispensable for the removal of evils, 
in every age and among every people. When general instructions 
of this character shall have ceased to be given, then will all whole- 
some reforms have ceased also. But, I cannot approve of the Pro- 
fessor's object in this remark. This object is to induce his readers 
to believe, that these abstract and general instructions are all that is 
needed to effect the termination of slavery. Now, I maintain that one 
thing more is wanting ; and that is, the application of these instruc- 
tions — of the principles contained in them — to the evil in hand. As 
well may it be supposed, that the mechanic can accomplish his work 
without the application, and by the mere possession, of his tools, as 
that a given reformation can be effected by unapplied general princi- 
ples. Of these principles, American philanthropists have been pos- 
sessed from time immemorial ; and yet all the while American slavery 
has been flourishing and growing strong. Of late, however, these 
principles have been brought to bear upon the system, and it mani- 
festly is already giving way. The groans of the monster prove that 



29 

those rays o/ truth, which did not disturb him whilst they continued 
to move in the parallel lines of abstractions and generalities, make it 
quite too hot for him since they arc converged to a burning focus 
upon his devoted head. "Why is it, for example, that the influence 
of the Boston Recorder and New- York Observer — why is it, that the 
influence of most of our titled divines — is decidedly hostile to 
the abolition of slavery? It is not because they are deficient in 
just general sentiments and principles respecting man's duties to 
God and his fellow man. It is simply because they stand opposed 
to the application of these sentiments and principles to the evil in 
question ; or, in other words, stand opposed to the Anti-Slavery So- 
ciety, which is the chosen lens of Divine Providence for turning these 
sentiments and principles, with all the burning, irresistible power of 
their concentration, against a giant wickedness. What is the work 
of the Temperance Societies, but to make a specific application of 
general truths and principles to the vice of intemperance 'I And the 
fact, that from the time of Noah's intoxication, until the organization 
of the American Temperance Society, the desolating tide of intem- 
perance had been continually swelling, proves that this reliance on 
unapplied principles, however sound — this " faith without works " — 
is utterly vain. Nathan found that nothing, short of a specific appli- 
cation of the principles of righteousness, would answer in the case 
of the sin of adultery. He had to abandon all generalities and cir- 
cuitousness, and come plump upon the royal sinner with his " Thou 
art the man." Those divines, whose policy it is to handle slave- 
holders " with gloves," if they must handle them at all, doubtless 
regard Nathan as an exceedingly impolite preacher. 

But, not only is it far less difficult to instruct the people of the 
United States than it was the people of the Roman Empire, in the 
sin of slavery ; it is also — for the reason that the sin is ours, to a 
far greater extent, than it was theirs — much more important for us 
than for them to be instructed in it. They had no share in the gov- 
ernment which upheld it. They could not abolish it by law. But, 
on the other hand, the people of the United States are themselves 
the government of their country. ■ They are the co-sovereigns of their 
nation. They uphold slavery by law, and they can put it down by 
law. In this point of view, therefore, slavery is an incomparably 
greater sin in us, than it was in (hem. 

Only one other reason will be given why it is more needful to 
overthrow American, than it was to overthrow Roman slavery. The 
Church was then but a handful of " 6trangers scattered throughout" 



30 

the heathen world. It was made up of those who had little influence 
and who were esteemed " the filth of the world, and the offscouring of 
all things." It had, probably, little, if any thing, to do with slavery, 
except to suffer its rigors in the persons of many of its members. 
But here, the Church, comprising no very small proportion of the 
whole population, and exerting a mighty influence for good or ill on 
the residue, is tainted, yes, rotten with slavery. In this contrast, we 
not only see another reason why the destruction of American slavery 
is more important than was that of Roman slavery ; but we also see, 
that the Apostles could have been little, if at all, actuated by that 
motive, which is more urgent than any other in the breasts of the 
American abolitionists — the motive of purging the Church of slavery. 

To return to what you say of the abominations and horrors of 
Greek and Roman slavery : — I should be doing you great injustice, 
were I to convey the idea that you approve of them. It is admitted 
that you disapprove of them ; and, it is also admitted, that no re- 
sponsibility for them rests on the relation of slaveholder and slave, if 
that relation have, as you labor to show, the stamp of Divine appro- 
bation. You say, that slavery, like marriage, is an institution sanc- 
tioned by the New Testament ; and that, therefore, neither for the 
evils which attend it, nor for any other cause, is it to be argued 
against. This is sound reasoning, on your part ; and, if your pre- 
mises are correct, there is no resisting your deduction. We are, in 
that case, not only not to complain of the institution of slavery, but 
we are to be thankful for it. Considering, however, that the whole 
fabric of your argument, in the principal or New Testament division 
of your book, is based on the alleged fact that the New Testament ap- 
proves of slavery, it seems to me that you have contented yourself, 
and sought to make your readers contented, with very slender evi- 
dences of the truth of this proposition. These evidences are, mainly 
■~that the New Testament does not declare slavery to be a sin : and, 
that the Apostles enjoin upon masters and servants their respective 
duties ; and this, too, in the same connexion in which they make 
similar injunctions upon those who stand in the confessedly proper re- 
lations of life — the husband and wife, the parent and child. Your other 
evidences, that the New Testament approves of slavery, unimportant 
as they are, will not be left unnoticed. 

I have attempted to show, that the omission of the New Testament 
to declare slavery to be a sin, is not proof that it is not a sin. I pass 
on to show, that the Apostolic injunction of duties upon masters and 
servants does not prove that slavery is sinless. 



31 

I have now reached another grand fallacy in your book. It is also 
found in Professor Hodge's article. You, gentlemen, take the liberty 
to depart from our standard English translation of the Bible, and to 
substitute " slaveholder" for " master" — " slave" for " servant" — 
and, in substance, " emperor" for " ruler" — and " subject of an im- 
perial government" for " subject of civil government generally." I 
know that this substitution well suits your purposes : but, I know not 
by what right you make it. Professor Hodge tells the abolitionists, 
certainly without much respect for either their intelligence or piety, that 
" it will do no good (for them) to attempt to tear the Bible to pieces." 
There is but too much evidence, that he himself has not entirely 
refrained from the folly and crime, which he is so ready to impute to 
others. 

I will proceed to offer some reasons for the belief, that when the 
Apostles enjoined on masters and servants their respective duties, 
they had reference to servitude in general, and not to any modification 
of it. 

1st. You find passages in the New Testament, where you think 
despotes refers to a person who is a slaveholder, and doulos to a person 
who is a slave. Admit that you are right : but this (which seems to 
be your only ground for it) does not justify you in translating these 
words " slaveholder" and " slave," whenever it may be advantageous 
to your side of the question to have them thus translated. These 
words have a great variety of meanings. For instance, there are 
passages in the New Testament where despotes means " God" — 
" Jesus Christ" — " Head of a family :" and where doulos means " a 
minister or agent" — " a subject of a king" — " a disciple or follower 
of Christ." Despotes and doulos are the words used in the original 
of the expression : " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in 
peace :" doulos in that of the expressions, " servant of Christ," and 
" let him be servant of all." Profane writers also use these words 
in various senses. My full belief is, that these words were used in 
both a generic and special sense, as is the word corn, which denotes 
bread-stuffs in genera), and also a particular kind of them ; as is the 
word meat, the meaning of which is, sometimes, confined to flesh 
that is eaten, and, at other times, as is frequently the case in the 
Scriptures, extends to food in general ; and, as is the word servant, 
which is suitable, either in reference to a particular form of servitude, 
or to servitude in general. There is a passage in the second chapter 
of Acts, which is, pf itself, perhaps, sufficient to convince an unbiased 
mind, that the Apostles used the word doulos in a generic, as well as 



32 

special sense. Dotdos and doule are the words in the phrase : " And 
on my servants and on my handmaidens." A reference to the pro- 
phecy as it stands, in Joel 2 : 28, 29, makes it more obvious, that 
persons in servitude are referred to under the words donlos and doule : 
and, that the predicted blessing was to be shed upon persons of all 
ages, classes, and conditions — upon old men and young men — upon 
sons and daughters — and upon man-servants and maid-servants. 
But, under the interpretation of those, who, like Professor Hodge 
and yourself, confine the meaning of dotdos and doule to a species of 
servants, the prophecy would have reference to persons of all ages, 
classes, and conditions — excepting certain descriptions of servants. 
Under this interpretation, we are brought to the absurd conclusion, 
that the spirit is to be poured out upon the master and his slaves — 
but not upon his hired servants. 

I trust that enough has been said, under this my first head, to show 
that the various senses in which the words despotes and doulos are em- 
ployed, justify me in taking the position, that whenever we meet with 
them, we are to determine, from the nature of the case, and from the 
connexion in which they are used, whether they refer to servitude in 
general, or to a species of it. 

2d. The confinement of the meaning of the words in question 
supposes, what neither religion nor common sense allows us to sup- 
pose, that slaveholders and slaves, despots and those in subjection to 
them, were such especial favorites of the Apostles, as' to obtain from 
them specific instructions in respect to their relative duties, whilst 
all other masters and servants, and all other rulers and subjects, 
throughout all future time, were left unprovided with such instructions. 
According to this supposition, when slavery and despotism shall, 
agreeably to Professor Hodge's expectations, have entirely ceased, 
there will be not one master nor servant, not one ruler nor subject in 
the whole earth, to fall, as such, under the Apostolic injunctions. 

3d. You admit that there were hirelings, in a community of primi- 
tive believers ; and I admit, for the moment, that there were slaves 
in it. Now, under my interpretation of the Apostolic injunction, all 
husbands, all wives, all parents, all children, and all servants, in this 
community, are told their respective duties : but, under yours, these 
duties are enjoined on all husbands, all wives, all parents, all children, 
and apart of the servants. May we not reasonably complain of your 
interpretation, that it violates analogy 1 

Imagine the scene, in which a father, in the Apostolic age, assem- 
bles his family to listen to a letter from the glowing Peter, or " such 



an one as Paul the aged.'' The letter contains instructions respect- 
ing the relative duties of lite. The venerable pair, who stand in the 
conjugal and parental relations, receive, with calm thankfulness, what 
is addressed to themselves ; — the bright-eyed little ones are eager to 
know what the Apostle says to children — a poor slave blesses God 
for his portion of the Apostolic counsel ; — and the scene would be 
one of unmingled joy, if the writer had but addressed hired servants, 
as well as slaves. One of the group goes away to weep, because the 
Apostle, had remembered the necessities of all other classes of men, 
and forgotten those of the hireling. Sir, do you believe that the Apos- 
tle was guilty of such an omission 1 I rejoice that my side of the 
question between us, does not call for the belief of what is so improb- 
able and unnatural — and, withal, so dishonoring to the memory of the 
Apostle. 

4th. Another reason for believing, that the Apostles intended no 
such limitation as that which you impose upon their words, is, that 
their injunctions are as applicable to the other classes of persons 
occupying these relations, as they are to the particular class to which 
you confine them. The hired servant, as well as the slave, needs to 
be admonished of the sins of " eye service'' and " purloining ;" and 
the master of voluntary, as well as involuntary servants, needs to be 
admonished to "give that which is just and equal." The ruler in a 
republic, or, in a limited monarchy, as well as the despot, requires to 
be reminded, that he is to be " a minister of God for good." So the 
subject of one kind of civil government, as well as that of another, 
needs to be told to be " subject unto the higher powers." 

I need not extend my remarks to prove, that despotes and doulos 
are, in the case before us, to be taken in their comprehensive sense 
of master and servant : and, clearly, therefore, the abolitionist is not 
guilty of violating your rule, " not to interfere with a civil relation (in 
another place, you say, 'any of the existing relations of life') for which, 
and to regulate which, either Christ or his Apostles have prescribed 
regulations." He believes, as fully as yourself, that the relation of 
master and servant is approved of God. It is the slavery modifica- 
tion of it — the slaveholder's abuse and perversion of the relation, in 
reducing the servant to a chattel — which, he believes, is not approved 
of God. 

For the sake of the argument, I will admit, that the slave alone, of 
all classes of servants, was favored with specific instructions from the 
Apostles : and then, how should we account for the selection ? In no 
other way, can I conceive, than, on the ground, that, his lot is so pe- 

5 



34 

culiarly hard — so much harder than that of persons under other forms 
of servitude — that he needs, whilst they do not, Apostolic counsel and 
advice to keep him just, and patient, and submissive. Let me be 
spared from the sin of reducing a brother man to such a lot. Your 
doctrine, therefore, that the Apostles addressed slaves only, and not 
servants in general, would not, were its correctness admitted, lift you 
out of all the difficulties in your argument. 

Again, does it necessarily follow from this admission, that the rela- 
tion of slaveholder and slave is sinless 1 Was the despotism of the 
Roman government sinless 1 I do not ask whether the abuses of civil 
government, in that instance, were sinless. But, I ask, was a gov- 
ernment, despotic in its constitution, depriving all its subjects of 
political power, and extending absolute control over their property 
and persons — was such a government, independently of the considera- 
tion of its abuses, (if indeed we may speak of the abuses of what is in 
itself an abuse,) sinless 1 I am aware, that Prof. Hodge says, that it 
was so : and, when he classes despotism and slavery with adiaphora, 
" things indifferent ;" and allows no more moral character to them 
than to a table or a broomstick, I trust no good man envies his optics. 
May I not hope that you, Mr. Smylie, perceive a difference between 
despotism and an " indifferent thing." May I not hope, that you 
will, both as a Republican and a Christian, take the ground, that des- 
potism has a moral character, and a bad one ? When our fathers 
prayed, and toiled, and bled, to obtain for themselves and their child- 
ren the right of self-government, and to effect their liberation from a 
power, which, in the extent and rigor of its despotism, is no more to 
be compared to the Roman government, than the " little finger" to the 
" loins," I doubt not, that they felt that despotism had a moral, and 
a very bad moral character. And so would Prof. Hodge have felt, 
had he stood by their side, instead of being one of their ungrateful 
sons. I say ungrateful — for, who more so, than he who publishes 
doctrines that disparage the holy cause in which they were embarked, 
and exhibits them, as contending for straws, rather than for principles? 
Tell me, how long will this Republic endure after our people shall 
have imbibed the doctrine, that the nature of civil government is an 
indifferent thing : and that the poet was right when he said, 

" For forms of government let fools contest ?" 

This, however, is but one of many doctrines of ruinous tendency to 
the cause of civil liberty, advanced by pro-slavery writers to sustain 
their system of oppression. 



35 

It would surely be superfluous to go into proofs, that the Roman 
government was vicious and wicked in its constitution and nature. 
Nevertheless, the Apostle enjoined submission to it, and taught its 
subjects how to demean themselves under it. Here, then, we have 
an instance, in which we cannot argue the sinlessness of a relation, 
from the fact of Apostolic injunctions on those standing in it. Take 
another instance. The Chaldeans went to a foreign land, and en- 
slaved its people — as members of your guilty partnership have done 
for some of the slaves you now own, and for the ancestors of others. 
And God destroyed the Chaldeans expressly " for all their evil thai 
they had done in Zion." But, wicked as they were, for having insti- 
tuted this relation between themselves and the Jews, God, neverthe- 
less, tells the Jews to submit to it. He tells them, " Serve the King 
of Babylon." He even says, " seek the peace of the city, whither I 
have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord 
for it ; for, in the peace thereof, shall ye have peace." Here then, 
we have another instance, in addition to that of the Roman despot 
and his subjects, in which the Holy Spirit prescribed regulations for 
wicked relations. You will, at least, allow, that the relation estab- 
lished by the Chaldeans between themselves and the captive Jews, 
was wicked. But, you will perhaps say, that this is not a relation 
coming within the contemplation of your rule. Your rule speaks of 
a civil relation, and also of the existing relations of life. But, the 
relation in question, being substantially that of slaveholder and slave, 
is, according to your own showing, a civil relation. Perhaps you will 
say, it is not an " existing relation of life." But what do you mean 
by " an existing relation of life ?" Do you mean, that it is a relation 
approved of God ? If you do, and insist that the relation of slave- 
holder and slave is " an existing relation of life," then you are guilty 
of begging the great question between us. Your rule, therefore, can 
mean nothing more than this — that any relation is rightful, for which 
the Bible prescribes regulations. But the relation referred to be- 
tween the Chaldeans and Jews, proves the falsity of the rule. Again, 
when a man compels me to go with him, is not the compelled relation 
between him and me a sinful one ? And the relation of robber and 
robbed, which a man institutes between himself and me, is not this 
also sinful ] But, the Bible has prescribed regulations for the rela- 
tions in both these cases. In the one, it requires me to " go with 
him twain ;" and, in the other, to endure patiently even farther spolia- 
tion and, " let him have (my) cloak also." In these cases, also, do 



36 

we see the falsity of your rule — and none the less clearly, because 
the relations in question are of brief duration. 

Before concluding my remarks on this topic, let me say, that your 
doctrine, that God has prescribed no rules for the behaviour of persons 
in any other than the just relations of life, reflects no honor on His 
compassion. Why, even we " cut-throat" abolitionists are not so hard- 
hearted as to overlook the subjects of a relation, because it is wicked. 
Pitying, as we do, our poor colored brethren, who are forced into a 
wicked relation, which, by its very nature and terms, and not by its 
abuses, as you would say, has robbed them of their all — even we 
would, nevertheless, tell them to " resist not evil" — " to be obedient 
unto their own masters" — " not purloining, but showing all good 
fidelity." We would tell them, as God told the captive Jews, to 
" seek the peace of those, whither they are carried away captives, 
and to pray unto the Lord" for them : and our hope of their emanci- 
pation is not, as it is most slanderously and wickedly reported to be, 
in their deluging the South with blood : but, it is, to use again those 
sweet words of inspiration, that " in the peace thereof they shall have 
peace." We do not communicate with the slave ; but, if we did, we 
would teach him, that our hope of his liberation is grounded largely 
in his patience, and that, if he would have us drop his cause from our 
hands, he has but to take it into his own, and attempt to accomplish 
by violence, that which we seek to effect through the power of truth 
and love on the understanding and heart of his master. 

Having disposed of your reasons in favor of the rightfulness of the 
relation of slaveholder and slave, I will offer a few reasons for believ- 
ing that it is not rightful. 

1st. My strongest reason is, that the great and comprehensive 
principles, and the whole genius and spirit of Christianity, are opposed 
to slavery. 

2d. In the case of Pharoah and his Jewish slaves, God manifested 
his abhorrence of the relation of slavery. The fact that the slavery 
in this case was political, instead of domestic, and, therefore, of a 
milder type than that of Southern slavery, does not forbid my reason- 
ing from the one form to the other. Indeed, if I may receive your 
declaration on this point, for the truth, I need not admit that the type 
of the slavery in question is milder than that of Southern slavery; — 
for you say, that " their (the Jews) condition was that of the most 
abject bondage or slavery." But the supposition that it is milder, 
being allowed to be correct, would only prove, that God's abhorrence 
.of Southern bondage as much exceeds that which he expressed of 



87 

Egyptian bondage, as the one system is more full than the other of 
oppression and cruelty. 

We learn from the Bible, that it was not because of the abuses of 
the Egyptian system of bondage, but, because of its sinful nature, 
that God required its abolition. He did not command Pharaoh to 
cease from the abuses of the system, and to correct his administration 
of it, but to cease from the system itself. " I have heard," says God, 
" the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in 
bondage ;" — not whom the Egyptians, availing themselves of their 
absolute power, compel to make brick without straw, and seek to 
waste and exterminate by the murder of their infant children ; — but 
simply " whom the Egyptians keep in bondage." These hardships 
and outrages were but the leaves and branches. The root of the 
abomination was the bondage itself, the assertion of absolute and 
slaveholding power by " a new king over Egypt, which knew not 
Joseph." In the next verse God says : " I will rid you" — not only 
from the burdens and abuses, as you would say, of bondage, — but 
*' out of their (the Egyptians) bondage" itself — out of the relation in 
which the Egyptians oppressively and wickedly hold you. 

God sends many messages to Pharoah. In no one of them does 
He reprove him for the abuses of the relation into which he had forced 
the Jews. In no one of them is he called on to correct the evils 
which had grown out of that relation. But, in every one, does God 
go to the root of the evil, and command Pharoah, " let my people 
go" — " let my people go, that they may serve me." The abolitionist 
is reproachfully called an " ultraist" and " an immediatist." It 
seems that God was both, when dealing with this royal slaveholder : 
— for He commanded Pharoah, not to mitigate the bondage of tha 
Israelites, but to deliver them from it — and that, too, immediately. 
The system of slavery is wicked in God's sight, and, therefore, did 
He require of Pharoah its immediate abandonment. The phrase, 
" let my people go, that they may serve me," shows most strikingly 
one feature of resemblance between Egyptian and American slavery. 
Egyptian slavery did not allow its subjects to serve God, neither does 
American. The Egyptian master stood between his slave and their 
God : and how strikingly and awfully true is it, that the American 
master occupies the like position ! Not only is the theory of slavery, 
the world over, in the face of God's declaration ; " all souls are mine :" 
but American slaveholders have brought its practical character to 
respond so fully to its theory — they have succeeded f so well, in ex- 



eluding the light and knowledge of God from the minds of their slaves 
— that they laugh at His claim to " all souls." 

3d. Paul, in one of his letters to the Corinthian Church, tells serv- 
vants — say slaves, to suit your views — if they may be free, to prefer 
freedom to bondage. But if it be the duty of slaves to prefer freedom 
to bondage, how clearly is it the correlative duty of the master to 
grant it to him ! You interpret the Apostle's language, in this case, as 
I do ; and it is not a little surprising, that, with your interpretation of 
it, you can still advocate slavery. You admit, that Paul says — I use 
your own words — " a state of freedom, on the whole, is the best." 
Now, it seems to me, that this admission leaves you without excuse, 
for defending slavery. You have virtually yielded the ground. And 
this admission is especially fatal to your strenuous endeavors to class 
the relation of master and slave with the confessedly proper relations 
of life, and to show that, like these, it is approved of God. Would 
Paul say to the child, " a state of freedom" from parental government 
" on the whole is the best ?" Would he say to the wife, " a state of 
freedom from your conjugal bonds" on the whole is the best 1 
Would he say to the child and wife, in respect to this freedom, " use 
it rather ?" Would he be thus guilty of attempting to annihilate the 
family relation 1 

Does any one wonder, that the Apostle did not use stronger lan- 
guage, in advising to a choice and enjoyment of freedom 1 It is 
similar to that which a pious, intelligent, and prudent abolitionist 
would now use under the like circumstances. Paul was endeavoring 
to make the slave contented with his hard lot, and to show him how 
unimportant is personal liberty, compared with liberation from spiritual 
bondage : and this explains why it is, that he spoke so briefly and 
moderately of the advantages of liberty. His advice to the slave to 
accept the boon of freedom, was a purely incidental remark : and we 
cannot infer from it, how great stress he would have laid on the evils 
of slavery, and on the blessings of liberty, in a discourse treating 
directly and mainly of those subjects. What I have previously said, 
however, shows that it would, probably, have been in vain, and worse 
than in vain, for him to have come out, on any occasion whatever, 
with an exposition of the evils of slavery. 

On the thirty-second page of your book, you say, " Masters can- 
not, according to the command of Christ, render to their slaves that 
which is just and equal, if you abolish the relation ; for, then they 
will cease to be masters." Abolish any of the relations for which 
regulations are provided " in the New Testament, and, in effect, you 



39 

abolish some of the laws of Christ." But, we have just seen that 
Paul was in favor of abolishing the relation of master and slave ; 
which, as you insist, is a relation for which regulations are provided 
in the New Testament. It is, therefore, irresistibly deduced from 
your own premises, that he was in favor of abolishing " the laws of 
Christ." It would require but little, if any, extension of your doctrine, 
to make it wrong to remove all the graven images out of a nation. 
For, in that event, the law of God against bowing down to them 
would have nothing left to act upon. It would thenceforth be in- 
operative. 

4th. Another reason for believing, that the Apostles did not approve 
of the slavery modification of servitude, is found in Paul's injunction : 
" Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them." I admit, 
that it is probable that others as well as slaves, are referred to in 
this injunction : but it certainly is not probable, that others, to the 
exclusion of slaves, are referred to. But, even on the supposition 
that slaves are not referred to, but those only who are tenants of 
prisons, let me ask you which you would rather be — a slave or a 
prisoner, as Paul probably was when he wrote this injunction ? — and 
whether your own description of the wretched condition of the Roman 
slave, does not prepare you to agree with me, that if the Apostle could 
ask sympathy for the prisoner, who, with all his deprivations, has still 
the protection of law, it is not much more due to the poor slave, who 
has no protection whatever against lawless tyranny and caprice ! 

But to proceed, if slaves are the only, or even a part of the persons 
referred to in the injunction, then you will observe, that the Apostle 
does not call for the exercise of sympathy towards those who are 
said to be suffering what you call the abuses of slavery ; but towards 
those who are so unhappy as to be but the subjects of it — towards 
those who are " in bonds." The bare relation of a slave is itself so 
grievous, as to call for compassion towards those who bear it. Now, 
if this relation were to be classed with the approved relations of life, 
why should the Apostle have undertaken to awaken compassion for 
persons, simply because they were the subjects of it 1 He never 
asked for sympathy for persons, simply because they were parties to 
the relations of husband and wife, parent and child. It may be 
worthy of notice, that the injunction under consideration is found in 
Paul's letter to the Jewish Christians. This attempt to awaken pity 
in behalf of the slave, and to produce abhorrence of slavery, was 
made upon these, and not upon the Gentile Christians ; because, per- 
haps, that they, who had always possessed the Oracles of God, could 



40 

bear it ; and they who had just come up out of the mire of heathenism, 
could not. If this explanation be just, it enforces my argument for 
ascribing to causes, other than the alleged sinfulness of the institution, 
the Apostle's omission to utter specific rebukes of slavery. 

5th. Another reason for believing that the slavery modification of 
servitude should not be classed with the confessedly proper relations 
with which you class it, is the conclusive one, that it interferes with, 
and tends to subvert, and does actually subvert, these relations. The 
Apostles prescribe duties, which are necessary to sustain these rela- 
tions, and make them fruitful sources of happiness to the parties to 
them. Among these duties are the following : " Wives, submit your- 
selves to your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord" — " Chi! Iren, 
obey your parents" — " Husbands, dwell with them" (your wives)* 
But slavery, where it does not make obedience to these commands 
utterly impossible, conditions it on the permission of usurpers, who 
have presumed to step between the laws of God and those on whom 
they are intended to bear. Slavery, not the law" of God, practically 
determines whether husbands shall dwell with their wives : and an 
amount of anguish, which God alone can compute, testifies that 
slavery has thus determined, times without number, that husbands 
shall not dwell with their wives. A distinguished gentleman, who 
has been much at the South, is spending a little time in my family. 
He told me but this day, that he had frequently known the air filled 
with shrieks of anguish for a whole mile around the spot, where, under 
the hammer of the auctioneer, the members of a family were under- 
going an endless separation from each other. It was but last week, 
that a poor fugitive reached a family, in which God's commands, 
" Hide the outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth" — " Hide not 
thyself from thy own flesh" — are not a dead letter. The heaviest 
burden of his heart is, that he has not seen his wife for five years, 
and does not expect to see her again : his master, in Virginia, having 
sold him to a Georgian, and his wife to an inhabitant of the District 
of Columbia. Whilst the law of God requires wives to " submit 
themselves to their husbands, as it is fit in the Lord ;" the law of 
slavery commands them, under the most terrific penalties, to submit 
to every conceivable form of violence, and the most loathsome pol- 
lution, " as it is fit" in the eyes of slaveholders — no small proportion 
of whom are, as a most natural fruit of slavery, abandoned to brutality 
and lust. The laws of South Carolina and Georgia make it an 
offence punishable with death, " if any slave shall presume to strike a 
white person." By the laws of Maryland and Kentucky, it is e«-> 



41 

acted " if any negro, mulatto, or Indian, bond or free, shall, at any 
time, lift his c her hand in opposition to any person, not being a negro 
or Indian, he or she shall, in the first-mentioned State, suffer the 
penalty of cro other, thirty-nine lashes on his 

or her bare baciv, well laid on, by order of the justice." In Louisiana 
there is a law — for the enactment of which, slavery is, of course, 
msible — in these words : ' Free people of color ought never to 
insult or strike while people, tor presume to conceive themselves 
equal to the whites : but, on the contrary, they ought lo yield to them 
on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect, 
under the penalty of imprisonment, according to the nature of the 
offence.''' The following extract of a letter, written to me from the 
South, by a gentleman who still resides there, serves to show how 
true it i , that " on every occasion," the colored person must yield to 
the white, and, especially, if the white be clothed with the authority 
of an ambassador of Christ. " A ne^ro was executed in Autauga 
Co., not long since, for the murder of his master. The latter, it 
seems, attempted to violate the wife of his slave in his presence, 
when the negro enraged, smote the wretch to the ground. And this 
master — this brute — this fiend — was a preacher of the gospel, in 
regular standing P" In a former part of this communication, I said 
enough to show, that slavery prevents children from complying with 
the command to obey their parents. But, in reply to what I have 
said of these outrages on the rights of husbands and wives, parents 
and c on maintain, that they are no part of the system of 

slavery. Slaveholders, however, being themselves judges, they are a 
part of it, or, at least, are necessary to uphold it ; else they would not 
by deliberate, solemn lion, authorize them. But, be this as it 

may, it is abundantly proven, that slavery is, essentially and inevit- 
ably, at war with the sacred rights of the family state. Let me say, 
then, in conclusion under this head, that in whatever other company 
you put slavery, place it not in that of the just relations of husband 
and wife, parent and child. They can no more company with each 
other, than can fire with water. Their natures are not only totally 
opposite to, but destructive of, each other. 

6th. The laws, to which you refer on the sixty-eighth page of youi 
book, tend to prove, and, so far as your admission of the nec< 
of them goes, do prove, that the relation of slaveholder and slave 
does not deserve a place, in the class of innocent and proper rela- 
tions. You there say, that the writings of " such great and good 
men as Wesley, Edwards, Porteus, Paley, llorsley, Scott, Clark, 

6 



4* 

Wilberforc 

if nut e pj ill) ;reat, men . ry for 

the safety of the institution of slave p ? to pass 1 .. -, forbidding mil- 
lions of our countrymen to read. You should have, also, mentioned 
the horrid sanctions of these laws — stripes, imprisonment, and death. 
Now, these laws disable the persons on whom they bear, from ful- 
filling God's commandments, and, especially, His commandment to 
" search the Scriptures." They are, therefore, wicked. What then, 
in its moral character, must be a relation, which, to sustain it, requires 
the aid of wicked laws ? — and, how entirely out of place must it be, 
when you class it with those just relations of life, that, certainly, re- 
quire none of the support, which, you admit, is indispensable to 
the preservation of the relation of slaveholder and slave ! It is 
true, that you attempt to justify the enactment of the laws in ques- 
tion, by the occasions which you say led to it. But, every law 
forbidding what God requires, is a wicked law — under whatever pre- 
texts, or for whatever purposes, it may have been enacted. Let the 
occasions which lead to a wicked measure be what they may, the 
wickedness of the measure is still sufficient to condemn it. 

In the case before us, we see how differently different persons are 
affected by the same fact. Whilst, the stand taken against slavery 
by Wesley, Edwards, and the other choice spirits you enumerate, 
serves but to inspire you with concern for its safety, it would, of itself, 
and without knowing their reasons for it, be well nigh enough to de- 
stroy my confidence in the institution. Let me ask you, Sir, whether 
it would not be more reasonable for those, who are so industriously 
engaged in insulating the system of American slavery, and shrouding 
it with darkness, to find less fault with the bright and burning light 
which the writings of the wisest and best men pour upon it, and more 
with the system which " hateth the light, neither cometh to the light." 

You would have your readers believe, that the blessings of educa- 
tion are to be withheld from your slaves — only " until the storm shall 
be overblown," and that you hope that " Satan's being let loose will 
be but for a little season." I say nothing more about the last ex- 
pression, than that I most sincerely desire you may penitently regret 
having attributed the present holy excitement against slavery to the 
influences of Satan. By " the storm" you, doubtless, mean the ex- 
citement produced by the publications and efforts of the American 
Anti-Slavery Society. Now, I will not suppose that you meant to 
deceive your readers on this point. You are, nevertheless, inex- 
cusable for using language so strikingly calculated to lead them into 



43 

error. It is not yet throe years since that Society was organized : 
but the statute books of some of the si ive I : conl 1i.11 >■ ■-. or- 
bidding the instruction of .-lues in reading, which w< i 
before you and I were born. As long ago as the year 1740, South 
Carolina passed a law, forbidding to teach slaves to write. Georgia 
did so in 1770. In the year 1800, thirty-three years before " the 
storm" of the Ai:*i-Slavery Society began to blow, South ( arolina 
passed a law, forbidding " assemblies of slave , fire negroes, &c, 
for the purpose of mental instruction." In the Revised Code of Vir- 
ginia of 1819, is a law similar to that last mentioned. In the year 
1818, the city of Savannah forbade by an ordinance, the instruction 
of all persons of color, -Mther free or bond, in reading and writing. 
I need not specify any more of these man-crushing, soul-killing, 
God-defying laws ; — nor need I refer again to the shocking penalties 
annexed to the violation of most of them. I conclude my remarks 
under this head, with the advice, that, in the next edition of your book, 
you do not assign the anti-slavery excitement, which is now spreading 
over our land, as the occasion of the passage of the laws in question. 
7th. The only other reason I will mention for believing, that the 
slavery modification of servitude is not approved of God, is, that it 
has never been known to work well — never been known to promote 
man's happiness or God's glory. Wickedness and wretchedness are, 
so uniformly, the product of slavery, that they must be looked upon, 
not as its abuses, but as its legitimate fruits. Whilst all admit, that 
the relations of the family state are, notwithstanding their frequent 
perversions, full of blessings to the world ; and that, but for them, 
the world would be nothing better than one scene of pollution and 
wo ; — to what history of slavery will you refer me, for proof of its 
beneficent operation 1 Will it be to the Bible history of Egyptian 
slavery 1 No — for that informs us of the exceeding wickedness and 
wretchedness of Egyptian slavery. Will it be to the history of 
Greek and Roman slavery 1 No — for your own book acknowledges 
its unutterable horrors and abominations. Will you refer me to the 
history of the West Indies for proofs of the happy fruits of slavery? 
Not until the earth is no more, will its polluted and bloody pages 
cease to testify against slavery. And, when we have come down to 
American slavery, you will not even open the book which records 
such facts, as that its subjects are forbidden to be joined in wedlock, 
and to read the Bible. No — you will not presume to look for a 
single evidence of the benign influences of a system, where, by the 
admission of your own ecclesiastical bodies, it has turned millions of 



44 

men into heathen. I say nothing now of your beautiful and harmless 
theories of slavery : — but this I say, that when you look upon slavery 
as it has existed, or now exists, either amidst the darkness of Ma- 
hommedanism or the light of Christianity, you dare not, as you hope 
for the Divine favor, say that it is a Heaven-descended institution ; 
and that, notwithstanding it is like Ezekiel's roll, " written within 
and without with lamentations and mourning and wo," it, neverthe- 
less, bears the mark of being a boon from God to man. 

Having disposed of your " strong reasons" for the position, that 
the New Testament authorizes slavery, I proceed to consider your 
remaining reasons for it. 

Because it does not appear, that our Saviour and the Apostle 
Peter told certain centurions, who, for the sake of the argument, I 
will admit were slaveholders, that slaveholding is sinful, you argue, 
and most confidently too, that it is not sinful. But, it docs not 
appear, that the Saviour and the Apostle charged any sinful practices 
upon them. Then, by your logic, all their other practices, as well as 
their slaveholding, were innocent, and these Roman soldiers 
literally perfect. — Again; how do you know that the Saviour and the 
Apostle did not tell them, on the occasion you refer to, '.hat they were 
sinners for being slaveholders? The fact, that the Bible does not 
inform us that they told them so, does not prove that they did not; 
much less does it prove, that they did not tell them so subsequently 
!:o their first interview with them. And again, the admission that 
they did not specifically attack slavery, at any of their interviews 
with the centurions, or on any other o tever, would not 

justify the inference, that it is sinless. I need not repeat the reason- 
■vhich makes the truth of this remark apparent. 

You refer to the Saviour's declaration of the unequalled faith of 
one of these centurions, with the view of making it appear that a 
person of so great faith could not be a great sinner. But, how 
long had he exercised this, or, indeed, any Christian faith? That 
he was on good terms with the Jews, and had built them a syna- 
gogue, is quite as strong evidence, that he had not, as that he had, 
previously to that time, believed in Jesus : — and, if he had not, then 
his faith, however strong, and his conversion, however decided, are 
nothing towards proving that slavery is sinlei . 

It is evident, that the Apostle v as sent to Cornelius for the single 
purpose of inculcating the doctrine of the remission of sin, through 
faith in Christ. 

I proceed to examine another of your arguments. From Paul's 



45 

declaration to the Elders at Miletus, " I have not shunned to declare 
unto you all the counsel of God," taken in connexion with the fact, 
that the Bible does not inform us that he spoke to them of slavehold- 
ing, you confidently and exultingly infer that it is innocent. Here, 
again, you prove too much, and therefore, prove nothing. It does 
not appear that he specified a hundredth part of their duties. If he 
did not tell them to abstain from slaveholding, neither did he tell 
them to abstain from gam^s and theatres. But, his silence about 
slaveholding proves to your mind its sinlessness : equally then 
should his silence about games and theatres satisfy you of their in- x 
nocence. Two radical errors run through a great part of your book. 
They are, that the Apostle gave specific instructions concerning all 
duties, and that the Bible contains these instructions. But, for these 
errors, your book would be far less objectionable than it is. I might, 
perhaps, rather say, that but for these, you could not have made up 
your book. 

And now, since Pau'rs address to the Elders has been employed 
by you in behalf of slavery, allow me to try its virtue against slavery: 
and, if it should turn out that you are slain with your own weapon, it 
will not be the first time that temerity has met with such a fate. I 
admit, that the Apostle does not tell the Elders of any wrong thing 
which thev had done ; but there are some wrong things from which 
he had himself abstained, and some right things which he had him- 
self done, of which he does tell them. He tells them, for instance, 
that he had not been guilty of coveting what was another's, and also, 
that with his own hands he had ministered to his own necessities 
and those of others : and he further tells them, that they ought to 
copy his example, and labor, as he had done, " to support the weak." 
Think you, sir, from this language that Paul was a slaveholder — 
and, that his example was such, as to keep lazy, luxurious slave- 
holders in countenance ? The slaveholder is guilty of coveting, not 
only all a man has, but even the man himself. The slaveholder will 
not only not labor with his hands to supply the wants of others, and 
" to support the weak ;" but he makes others labor to supply his 
wants : — yes, makes them labor unpaid — night and day — in storm, as 
well as in sunshine — under the lash — bleeding — groaning — dying — 
and all this, not to minister to his actual needs, but to his luxurious- 
uess and sensuality. 

You ridicule the idea of the abolition of slavery, because it would 
make the slaveholder " so poor, as to oblige him to take hold of the 
rnaui and wedge himself — he must catch, curry, and saddle his own 



46 

horse — he must black his own brogans (for he will not be able to buj 
boots) — his wife must go herself to the wash-tub--take hold of die 
scrubbing broom, wash the pots, and cook all that she and her rail- 
mauler will eat." If Paul wcve, as you judge he was, opposed to the 
abolition of slavery, it is at least certain, from what he says of the 
character of his life in his address to the Elders, that his opposition 
did not spring from such considerations as array you against it. In 
his estimation, manual labor was honorable. In a slaveholding com- 
munity, it is degrading. It is so in your own judgment, or you 
would not hold up to ridicule those humble employments, which 
reflect disgrace, only where the moral atmosphere is tainted by sla- 
very. That the pernicious influences of slavery in this respect are 
felt more or less, in every part of this guilty nation, is but too true. 
I put it to your candor, sir, whether the obvious fact, that slavery 
makes the honest labor of the hands disreputable, is not a weighty 
argument against the supposition that God approves it? I put it to 
your candor, sir, whether the fact, which you, at least, cannot gain- 
say, that slavery makes even ministers of the gospel despise the 
employmentsof seven-eighths of the human family, and, consequently, 
the humble classes, who labor in them — I put it to your candor, 
whether the institution, which breeds such contempt of your fellow- 
men and fellow Christians, must not be offensive to Him, who com- 
mands us to " Honor all men, and love the brotherhood ?',' 

In another argument, you attempt to show, that Paul's letter to 
Philemon justifies slaveholding, and also the apprehension and return 
of fugitive slaves. After having recited the Resolution of the Chili- 
cothe Presbytery — " that to apprehend a slave who is endeavoring to 
escape from slavery, with a view to restore him to his master, is a 
direct violation of the Divine law, and, when committed by a mem- 
ber of the church, ought to subject him to censure" — you undertake 
to make your readers believe, that Paul's sending Onesimus to Phile- 
mon, is a case coming fairly within the purview of the resolution. 
Let us see if it does. A man by the name of Onesimus was con- 
verted to Christianity, under Paul's ministry at Rome. Paul learnt 
that he had formerly been a servant — say a slave — of Philemon, who 
was a " dearly beloved" Christian : and believing that his return to 
his old master would promote the cause of Christ, and beautifully 
exemplify its power, he advised him to return to him. He followed 
the Apostle's advice and returned. Now, from this example, you 
attempt to derive a justification for "a member of a Church" to be 
engaged in forcibly apprehending and restoring fugitive slaves. I 



47 

sav forcibly — as the apprehension an 1 return, referred to in the Re- 
solution, arc clearlj . I cannot refrain, sir, from saying, 
that Y'ui greatly wrong the memory of that blessed Apostle of the 
Lord Jesus, in construing his writings to authorize such violence 
apon the persons and rights of men. And greatly, also, do you 
wrong the Resolution in question, by your endeavor to array the 
Bible against it. The Resolution is right ; it is noble — it denotes in 
the source whence it emanated, a proper sense of the rights and dig- 
nity of man. It is all the better for being marked with an honorable 
contempt of wicked and heaven-daring laws. May 1, having the 
suspicion, or even the certain knowledge, that my fellow man was 
once held in slavery, and is still legally a slave, seize upon him and 
reduce him again to slavery? May I thus deal with a guiltless and 
unaccused brother? Human laws may, it is true, bear me out in 
this man-stealing, which is not less flagrant than that committed on 
the coast of Africa : — but, says the Great Law-giver, " The word 
that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day :" — and, 
it is a part of this " word," that " he that stealeth a man shall surely 
be put to death." In that last day, the mayors, recorders, sheriffs, 
and others, who have been engaged, whether in their official or indi- 
vidual capacity, in slave-catching and man-stealing, will find human 
laws but a flimsy protection against the wrath of Him, who judges his 
creatures by his own and not by human laws. In that " last day," 
all who have had a part, and have not repented of it, in the sin of 
treating man as property ; all, I say, whether slaveholders or their 
official or unofficial assistants, the drivers upon their plantations, or 
their drivers in the free States — all, who have been guilty of throwing 
God's " image" into the same class with the brutes of the field — will 
find, that He is the avenger of his poorest, meanest ones — and that 
the crime of transmuting His image into property, is but aggravated 
by the fact and the plea that it was committed under the sanction of 
human laws. 

But, to return — wherein does the letter of Paul to Philemon justify 
slaveholding ? What evidence does it contain, that Philemon was a 
slaveholder at the time it was written? He, who had been his 
slave " in time past," had, very probably, escaped before Phile- 
mon's conversion to Christ. This " time past," may have been a 
long " time past." The word in the original, which is translated " in 
time past," does not forbid the supposition. Indeed, it is the same 
word, which the Apostle uses in the thirteenth verse of the first chap- 
ter of Galatians ; and there it denotes a long " time past" — as much as 



48 

from fifteen to eighteen years. Besides, Onesimus' escape and 
return both favor the supposition, that it was between the two events 
that Philemon's conversion took place. On the one hand, he fled to 
escape from the cruelties of an unconverted master ; on the other, 
he was encouraged to follow the Apostle's advice, by the considera- 
tion, that on his return to Philemon he should not have to encounter 
again the unreasonableness and rage of a heathen, but that he should 
meet with the justice and tenderness of a Christian — qualities, with 
the existence and value of which, he had now come to an experi- 
mental acquaintance. Again, to show that the letter in question does 
not justify slaveholding — in what character was it, that Paul sent 
Onesimus to Philemon'? Was it in that of a slave? Far from it. 
It was, in that of " a brother beloved," as is evident from his injunc- 
tion to Philemon to " receive him forever — not now as a slave, but 
above a slave — a brother beloved." 

It is worthy of remark, that Paul's message to Philemon, shows, 
not only that he himself was not in favor of slaveholding, but, that he 
believed the gospel had wrought such an entire change on this sub- 
ject, in the heart of Philemon, that Onesimus would find on his return 
to him, the tyrant and the slaveholder sunk in the brother and the 
Christian. 

Paul's course in relation to Onesimus was such, as an abolitionist 
would deem it proper to adopt, under the like circumstances. If a 
fugitive slave, who had become a dear child of God, were near me, 
and, if I knew that his once cruel master had also become a " dearly 
beloved" Christian; and if, therefore, I had reason to believe, as 
Paul had, in the case of Philemon, that he would " receive him for- 
ever — not now as a slave, but above a slave, a brother beloved," I 
would advise him to revisit his old master, provided he could do so, 
without interference and violence from others. Such interference 
and violence did not threaten Onesimus in his return to Philemon. 
He was not in danger of being taken up, imprisoned, and sold for his 
jail fees, as a returning Onesimus would be in parts of this nation. 

On the 72d page of your book, you utter sentiments, which, I trust, 
all your readers will agiee, are unworthy of a man, a republican, and 
a Christian. You there endeavor again to make it appear, that it is 
not the relation of master and slave, but only the abuse of it, which 
is to be objected to. — You say : " Independence is a charming idea, 
especially to Americans : but what gives it the charm 1 Is it the thing 
in itself? or is it because it is a release from the control of a bad 
master ? Had Great Britain been a kind master, our ancestors were 



49 

willing to remain her slaves." In reply to this I would say, that it 
must be a base spirit which does not prize " independence" for its 
own sake, whatever privation and suffering may attend it ; and 
much more base must be that spirit, which can exchange that " inde- 
pendence" for a state of slavish subjection — even though that state 
abound in all sensual gratifications. To talk of " a kind master" is 
to talk of a blessing for a dog, but not for a man, who is made to 
" call no man master." Were the people of this nation like your- 
self, they would soon exchange their blood-bought liberties for sub- 
jection to any despot who would promise them enough to eat, drink, 
and wear. But, I trust, that we at the North are " made of sterner 
stuff." They, who make slaves of others, can more easily become 
slaves themselves : for, in their aggressions upon others, they have 
despised and trampled under foot those great, eternal principles of 
right, which not only constitute the bulwark of the general freedom ; 
but his respect for which is indispensable to every man's valuation 
and protection of his individual liberties. This train of thought asso- 
ciates with itself in my mind, the following passage in an admirable 
speech delivered by the celebrated William Pinckney, in the Mary- 
land House of Delegates in 1789. Such a speech, made at the pre- 
sent time in a slave State, would probably cost the life of him who 
should make it ; nor could it be delivered in a free State at any less 
sacrifice, certainly, than that of the reputation of the orator. What a 
retrograde movement has liberty made in this country in the last 
fifty years ! 

" Whilst a majority of your citizens are accustomed to rule with 
the authority of despots, within particular limits — while your youths 
are reared in the habit of thinking that the great rights of human 
nature are not so sacred, but they may with innocence be trampled 
on, can it be expected, that the public mind should glow with that 
generous ardor in the cause of freedom, which can alone save a 
government, like ours, from the lurking demon of usurpation? Do 
you not dread the contamination of principle ? Have you no alarms 
for the continuance of that spirit, which once conducted us to victory 
and independence, when the talons of power were unclasped for our 
destruction ? Have you no apprehension left, that when the votaries 
of freedom sacrifice also at the gloomy altars of slavery, they will, at 
length, become apostates from them for ever? For my own part, I 
have no hope, that the stream of general liberty will flow for ever, 
unpolluted, through the foul mire of partial bondage, or that they, who 

7 



50 

have been habituated to lord it over others, will not be base enough, 
in time, to let others lord it over them. If they resist, it will be the 
struggle of pride and selfishness, not of principle." 

Had Edmund Burke known slaveholders as well as Mr. Pinckney 
knew them, he would not have pronounced his celebrated eulogium 
on their love of liberty ; — he would not have ascribed to them any 
love of liberty, but the spurious kind which the other orator, impliedly, 
ascribes to them — that which " pride and selfishness" beget and fos- 
ter. Genuine love of liberty, as Mr. Pinckney clearly saw, springs 
from " principle," and is found no where but in the hearts of those 
who respect the liberties and the rights of others. 

I had reason, in a former part of this communication, to charge 
some of the sentiments of Professor Hodge with being alike reproach- 
ful to the memory of our fathers, and pernicious to the cause of civil 
liberty. There are sentiments on the 72d page of your book, ob- 
noxious to the like charge. If political " independence" — if a free 
government — be the poor thing — the illusive image of an American 
brain — which you sneeringly represent it, we owe little thanks to 
those who purchased it for us, even though they purchased it with 
their blood ; and little pains need we take in that case to preserve it. 
When will the people of the Northern States see, that the doctrines 
now put forth so industriously to maintain slavery, are rapidly under- 
mining liberty ] 

On the 43d page of your book you also evince your low estimate 
of man's rights and dues. You there say, " the fact that the planters 
of Mississippi and Louisiana, even while they have to pay from 
twenty to twenty-five dollars per barrel for pork the present season, 
afford to their slaves from three to four and a half pounds per week, 
does not show, that they are neglectful in rendering to their slaves 
that which is just and equal." If men had only an animal, and not a 
spiritual and immortal nature also, it might do for you to represent 
them as well provided for, if but pork enough were flung to them. 
How preposterous to tell us, that God approves a system which 
brings a man, as slavery seems to have brought you, to regard his 
fellow man as a mere animal ! 

I am happy to find that you are not all wrong. You are no 
41 gradualist." You are not inconsistent, like those who admit that 
slavery is sinful, and yet refuse to treat it as sinful. I hope our 
Northern " gradualists" will profit by the following passage in your 
book : "If I were convinced by that word (the Bible) that slavery is 
itself a sin, I trust that, let it cost what it would, I should be an aboli- 



51 

tionist, because there is no truth, more clear to my mind, than that 
the gospel requires an immediate abandonment of sin." 

You have no doubt of your right to hold your fellow men, as 
slaves. I wish you had given your readers more fully your views of 
the origin of this right. I judge from what you say, that you trace 
it back to the curse pronounced by Noah upon Canaan. But was 
that curse to know no end ? Were Canaan's posterity to endure the 
entailment of its disabilities and woes, until the end of time 1 Was 
Divine mercy never to stay the desolating waves of this curse 1 Was 
their harsh and angry roar to reach, even into the gospel dispensa- 
tion, and to mingle discordantly with the songs of " peace on earth 
and good will to men ?" Was the captivity of Canaan's race to be 
even stronger than He, who came " to bind up the broken-hearted, 
and proclaim liberty to the captives ]" But who were Canaan and 
his descendants 1 You speak of them, and with singular unfairness, 
I think, as " ike posterity of Ham, from whom, it is supposed, sprang 
the Africans." They were, it is true, a part of Ham's posterity ; but 
to call them " the posterity of Ham," is to speak as though he had no 
other child than Canaan. The fifteenth to nineteenth verses of the 
tenth chapter of Genesis teach us, beyond all question, that Ca- 
naan's descendants inhabited the land of Canaan and adjacent terri- 
tory, and that this land is identical with the country afterwards 
occupied by the Jews, and known, in modern times, by the name of 
Palestine, or the Holy Land. Therefore, however true it may be, 
that a portion of Ham's posterity settled in Africa, we not only have 
no evidence that it was the portion cursed, but we have conclusive 
evidence that it was not. 

But, was it a state of slavery to which Canaanites were doomed? 
I will suppose, for a moment, that it was : and, then, how does it 
appear right to enslave them ? The curse in question is prophecy. 
Now prophecy does not say what ought to come to pass : nor does 
it say, that they who have an agency in the production of the foretold 
event, will be innocent in that agency. If the prediction of an event 
justifies those who are instrumental in producing it, then was Judas 
innocent in betraying our Saviour. " It must needs be that offences 
come, but wo to that man by whom the offence cometh." Prophecy 
simply tells what will come to pass. The question, whether it was 
proper to enslave Canaanites, depends for its solution not on the 
curse or prophecy in question. If the measure were in conformity 
with the general morality of the Bible, then it was proper. Was it in 
conformity with it ? It was not. The justice, equity and mercy 



52 

which were, agreeable to the Divine command, to characterize the 
dealings of the Jews with each other, are in such conformity, and 
these are all violated by slavery. If those dealings were all based on 
the general morality of the Bible, as they certainly were, then slavery, 
which, in its moral character, is completely opposite to them, cannot 
rest on that morality. If that morality did not permit the Jews to 
enslave Canaanites, how came they to enslave them? You will say, 
that they had special authority from God to do so, in the words, 
" Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall 
be of the heathen that are around about you ; of them shall ye buy 
bondmen and bondmaids." Well, I will admit that God did in one 
instance, and that He may have done so in others, give special au- 
thority to the Jews to do that, which, without such authority, would 
have been palpably and grossly immoral. He required them to 
exterminate some of the tribes of the Canaanites. He may have 
required them to bring other Heathens under a form of servitude 
violative of the general morality of his word. — Of course, no blame 
attaches to the execution of such commands. When He specially 
deputes us to kill for Him, we are as innocent in the agency, not- 
withstanding the general law, "thou shalt not kill," as is the earth- 
quake or thunderbolt, when commissio:.ed to destroy. Samuel was 
as innocent in hewing " Agag in pieces," as is the tree that falls 
upon the traveller. It may be remarked, in this connexion, that the 
fact that God gave a special statute to destroy some of the tribes of 
the Canaanites, argues the contrariety of the thing required to the 
morality of the Bible. It argues, that this morality would not have 
secured the accomplishment of what was required by the statute. 
Indeed, it is probable that it was, sometimes, under the influence of 
the tenderness and mercy inculcated by this morality, that the Jews 
were guilty of going counter to the special statute in question, and 
sparing the devoted Canaanites, as in the instance when they " spared 
Agag." We might reason, similarly to show that a special statute, 
if indeed there were such a one, authorizing the Jews to compel the 
Heathen to serve them, argues that compulsory service is contrary to 
fundamental morality. We will suppose that God did, in the special 
statute referred to, clothe the Jews with power to enslave Heathens, 
and now let me ask you, whether it is by this same statute to enslave, 
that you justify your neighbors and yourself for enslaving your fellow 
men? But this is a special statute, conferring a Mower on the Jews 
only — a power too, not to enslave whomsoever they could ; but only 
a specified portion of the human family, and this portion, as we have 



63 

seen, of a stock, other than that from which you have obtained your 
slaves. If the special statutes, by which God clothed the Jews with 
peculiar powers, may be construed to clothe you with similar powers, 
then, inasmuch as they were authorized and required to kill Canaan- 
ites, you may hunt up for destruction the straggling descendants of 
such of the devoted ones, as escaped the sword of the Jews. Or, to 
make a different interpretation of your rights, under this supposition ; 
since the statute in question authorized and required the Jews to kill 
the heathen, within the borders of what was properly the Jews' coun- 
try, then you are also authorized and required to kill the heathens 
within the limits of your country : — and these are not wanting, if the 
testimony of your ecclesiastical bodies, before referred to. can be 
relied on ; and, if it be as they say, that the millions of the poor 
colored brethren in the midst of you are made heathens by the opera- 
tion of the system, to which, with unparalleled wickedness, they are 
subjected. 

If then, neither Noah's curse, nor the special statute in question, 
authorize you to enslave your fellow men, there is, probably, but one 
ground on which you will contend for authority to do so — and this is 
the ground of the general morality of the Christian religion — of the 
general principles of right and duty, in the word of God. Do you 
find your authority on this ground? If you do, then, manifestly, you 
have a right to enslave me, and I a right to enslave you, and every 
man has a right to enslave whomsoever he can ; — a right as perfect, 
as is the right to do good to one another. Indeed, the enslavement 
of each other would, under this construction of duty, be the doing of 
wood to one another. Think you, sir, that the universal exercise of 
this right would promote the fulfilment of the " new commandment 
that ye love one another]" Think you, it would be the harbinger of 
millenial peace and blessedness? Or, think you not, rather, that it 
would fully and frightfully realize the prophet's declaration : '•' They 
all lie in wait for blood : they hunt every man his neighbor with a net." 

It* any pco;>K' have a right to enslave their fellow men, it must be 
the Jews, if they once had it. But if they ever had it, it ceased, 
when all their peculiar rights ceased. In respect to rights from the 
Most High, they are now on the same footing with other races of 
men. When " the vail of the temple was rent in twain from the top 
to the bottom," then that distinction from the Gentile, in which the 
Jew had gloried, ceased, and the partition wall between them was 
prostrate for ever. The Jew, as well as the Gentde, was never more 
to depart from the general morality of the Bible. He was never 



54 

again to be under any special statutes, whose requirements should 
bring him into collision with that morality : He was no more to con- 
fine his sympathies and friendships within the narrow range of the 
twelve tribes : but every son and daughter of Adam were thenceforth 
entitled to claim from him the heart and hand of a brother. " Under 
the glorious dispensation of the gospel," says the immortal Granville 
Sharp, " we are absolutely bound to consider ourselves as citizens of 
the world; every man whatever, without any partial distinction of 
nation, distance, or complexion, must necessarily be esteemed our 
neighbor and our brother ; and we are absolutely bound, in Christian 
duty, to entertain a disposition towards all mankind, as charitable and 
benevolent, at least, as that which was required of the Jews under 
the law towards their brethren ; and, consequently, it is absolutely 
unlawful for those who call themselves Christians, to exact of their 
brethren (I mean their brethren of the universe) a more burthensome 
service, than that to which the Jews were limited with respect to 
their brethren of the house of Israel ; and the slavery or involuntary 
bondage of a brother Israelite was absolutely forbid." 

It occurs to me, that after all which has been said to satisfy you, 
that compulsory servitude, if such there were among the Jews, cannot 
properly be pleaded in justification of yours ; a question may still be 
floating in your mind whether, if God directed his chosen people to 
enslave the Heathen, slavery should not be regarded as a good sys- 
tem of servitude? Just as pertinently may you ask, whether that is 
not a good system of servitude, which is found in some of our state 
prisons. Punishment probably — certainly not labor — is the leading 
object in the one case as well as the other : and the labor of the 
bondman in the one, as well as of the convict in the other, consti- 
tutes but a subordinate consideration. To suppose that God would, 
with every consideration out of view, but that of having the best rela- 
tion of employer and laborer, make choice of slavery — to suppose 
that He believes that this state of servitude operates most benefi- 
cially, both for the master and the servant — is a high impeachment 
of the Divine wisdom and goodness. But thus guilty are you, if 
you are unwilling to believe, that, if He chose the severe servitude 
in question, He chose it for the punishment of his enemies, or from 
some consideration, other than its suitableness for the ordinary pur- 
poses of the relation of master and servant. 

But it has been for the sake of argument only, that I have admitted 
that God authorized the Jews to enslave the heathen. I now totally 
deny that He did so-. You will, of course, consent that if He did 



55 

so, it was in a special statute, as was the caso when lie author- 
ized them to exterminate other heathen : and you will as readily 
consent that He enacted the statutes, in both instances, with the 
view of punishing his enemies. Now, in killing the Canaanites, 
the Jew was constituted, not the owner of his devoted fellow man, 
but simply the executioner of God's vengeance : and evidently, such 
and no other was his character when he was reducing the Canaanite 
to involuntary servitude — that he did so reduce him, and was commis- 
sioned by God to do so, is the supposition we make for the sake of 
argument. Had the Jews been authorized by God to shut up in dun- 
geons for life those of the heathen, whom they were directed to have 
for bondmen and bondmaids, you would not claim, that they, any 
more than sheriffs and jailers in our day, are to be considered in the 
light of owners of the persons in their charge. Much less then, can 
the Jews be considered as the owners of any person whom they held 
in servitude : for, however severe the type of that servitude, the 
liberty of its subject was not restricted, as was that of the prisoners 
in question : — most certainly, the power asserted over him is not to 
be compared in extent with that asserted by the Jew over the Ca- 
naanite, whom he slew ; — a case in which he was, indisputably, but 
the executioner of the Divine wrath. The Canaanite, whether de- 
voted to a violent death or to an involuntary servitude, still remained 
the property of God : and God no more gave him up to be the property 
of the executioner of his wrath, than the people of the State of New 
York give up the offender against public justice to be the property ot 
the ministers of that justice. God never suspends the accountability 
of his rational creatures to himself: and his rights to them, He never 
transfers to others. He could not do so consistently with his attributes, 
and his indissoluble relations to man. But slavery claims, that its 
subjects are the property of man. It claims to turn them into mere 
chattels, and to make them as void of responsibility to God, as other 
chattels. Slavery, in a word, claims to push from his throne the 
Supreme Being, who declares, "all souls are mine." That it does not 
succeed in getting its victim out of God's hand, and in unmanning and 
chattelizing him — that God's hold upon him remains unbroken, and 
that those upward tendencies of the soul, which distinguish man from 
the brute, are not yet entirely crushed in him — is no evidence in favor 
of its nature : — it simply proves, that its power is not equal to its pur- 
poses. We see, then, that the Jews — if it be true that they reduced 
their fellow men to involuntary servitude, and did so as the Heaven- 
appointed ministers of God's justice, — are not to be charged with 



56 

slaveholding for it. There may be involuntary servitude where there 
is no slavery. The essential and distinguishing feature of slavery is 
its reduction of man to property — to a thing. A tenant of one of our 
state prisons is under a sentence of " hard labor for life." But he 
is not a slave. That is, he is not the thing which slavery would 
mark its subject. He is still a man. Offended justice has placed 
him in his present circumstances, because he is a man : and, it is 
because he is a man and not a thing — a responsible, and not an irre- 
sponsible being, that he must continue in his present trials and 
sufferings. 

God's commandments to the Jews, respecting servants and 
strangers, show that He not only did not authorize them to set up 
the claim of property in their fellow men, but that He most carefully 
guarded against such exercises of power, as might lead to the 
assumption of a claim so wrongful to Himself. Some of these com- 
mandments I will bring to your notice. They show that whatever 
was the form of servitude under which God allowed the Jews to hold 
the heathen, it was not slavery. Indeed, if all of the Word of God 
which bears on this point were cited and duly explained, it would, 
perhaps, appear that He allowed no involuntary servitude whatever 
amongst the Jews. I give no opinion whether he allowed it or not. 
There are strong arguments which go to show, that He did not allow 
it ; and with these arguments the public will soon be made more 
extensively acquainted. It is understood, that the next number of 
the Anti-Slavery Examiner will be filled with them. 

1st. So galling are the bonds of Southern slavery, that it could 
not live a year under the operation of a law forbidding the restora- 
tion of fugitive servants to their masters. How few of the discon- 
tented subjects of this oppressive servitude would agree with Ham- 
let, that it is better to 

" bear those ills we have, 

Than fly to others that we know not ot." 

What a running there would be from the slave States to the free ! — 
from one slave State to another ! — from one plantation to another ! 
Now, such a law — a solemn commandment of God — many writers 
on slavery are of the opinion, perhaps too confident opinion, was in 
force in the Jewish nation (Deut. xxiii, 15) ; and yet the system of 
servitude on which it bore, and which you cite as the pattern and 
authority for your own, lived in spite of it. How could it? Mani- 
festly, because its genius was wholly unlike that of Southern slavery ; 



57 

and because its rigors and wrongs, if rigors and wrongs there were 
in it, bear no comparison to those which characterize Southern 
slavery ; and which would impel nine-tenths of its adult subjects to 
fly from their homes, did they but know that they would not be obliged 
to return to them. When Southern slaveholders shall cease to scour 
the land for fugitive servants, and to hunt them with guns and dogs, 
and to imprison, and scourge, and kill them ; — when, in a word, they 
shall subject to the bearing of such a law as that referred to their 
system of servitude, then we shall begin to think that they are sincere 
in likening it to the systems which existed among the Jews. The 
law, enacted in Virginia in 1705, authorizing any two justices of the 
peace " by proclamation to outlaw runaways, who might thereafter 
be killed and destroyed by any person whatsoever, by such ways and 
means as he might think fit, without accusation or impeachment of 
any crime for so doing," besides that it justifies what I have just 
said about hunting fugitive servants, shows, 1st. That the American 
Anti-Slavery Society is of too recent an origin to be the occasion, as 
slaveholders and their apologists would have us believe, of all the 
cruel laws enacted at the South. 2d. That Southern slaveholders 
would be very unwilling to have their system come under the opera- 
tion of such a law as that which allowed the Jewish servant to change 
his master. 3d. That they are monsters, indeed, into which men 
may be turned by their possession of absolute power. 

You, perhaps, suppose, (and I frankly admit to you, that there is 
some room for the supposition,) that the servants referred to in the 
15th and 16th verses of the 23d chapter of Deuteronomy, were such 
as had escaped from foreign countries to the country of the Jews. 
But, would this view of the matter help you ? By taking it, would 
you not expose yourself to be most pertinently and embarrassingly 
asked, for what purpose these servants fled to a strange and most 
odious people 1 — and would not your candid reply necessarily be, 
that it was to escape from the galling chains of slavery, to a far-famed 
milder type of servitude 1 — from Gentile oppression, to a land in which 
human rights were protected by Divine laws ? But, as I have pre- 
viously intimated, I have not the strongest confidence in the anti- 
slavery argument, so frequently drawn from this passage of the Bible. 
I am not sure that a Jewish servant is referred to : nor that on the 
supposition of his being a foreigner, the servant came under any form 
of servitude when entering the land of the Jews. Before leaving 
the topic, however, let me remark, that the passage, under any con- 
struction of it, makes against Southern slavery. Admit that the 

8 



58 

fugitive servant was a foreigner, and that he was box reduced to servi- 
tude on coming among the Jews, let me ask you whether the law in 
question, under this view of it, would be tolerated by the spirit of 
Southern slavery 1 — and whether, before obedience would be rendered 
to it, you would not need to have a different type of servitude, in the 
place of slavery? You would — I know you would — for you have 
been put to the trial. When, by a happy providence, a vessel was 
driven, the last year, to a West India island, and the chains of the 
poor slaves with which it was filled fell from around them, under 
freedom's magic power, the exasperated South was ready to go to 
war with Great Britain. Then, the law against delivering up foreign 
servants to their masters was not relished by you. The given case 
comes most strikingly within the supposed policy of this law. The 
Gentile was to be permitted to remain in the land to which he had 
fled, and where he would have advantages for becoming acquainted 
with the God of the Bible. Such advantages are they enjoying who 
escaped from the confessed heathenism of Southern slavery to the 
island in question. They are now taught to read that " Book of life," 
which before, they were forbidden to read. But again, suppose a 
slave were to escape from a West India island into the Southern 
States — would you, with your " domestic institutions," of which you 
are so jealous, render obedience to this Divine law 1 No ; you would 
subject him for ever to a servitude more severe than that, from which he 
had escaped. Indeed, if a freeman come within a certain portion of 
our Southern country, and be so unhappy as to bear a physical re- 
semblance to the slave, he will be punished for that resemblance, by 
imprisonment, and even by a reduction to slavery. 

2d. Southern slaveholders, who, by their laws, own men as abso- 
lutely as they own cattle, would have it believed, that Jewish masters 
thus owned their fellow-men. If they did, why was there so wide a 
difference between the commandment respecting the stray man, and 
that respecting the stray ox or ass 1 The man was not, but the beasts 
were, to be returned ; and that too, even though their owner was the 
enemy of him who met them. (Ex. 23. 4.) I repeat the question; 
— why this difference 1 The only answer is, because God made the 
brute to be the property of man ; but He never gave us our noble 
nature for such degradation. Man's title deed, in the eighth Psalm, 
extends his right of property to the inanimate and brute creation 
only — not to the flesh and bones and spirit of his fellow-man. 

3d. The very different penalties annexed to the crime of stealing 
a man, and to that of stealing a thing, shows the eternal and infinite 



59 

difference which God has established between a man and property. 
The stealing of a man was surely to be punished with death ; whilst 
mere property was allowed to atone for the offence of stealing 
property. 

4th. Who, if not the slave, can be said to be vexed and oppressed ! 
But God's command to his people was, that they should neither " vex 
a stranger, nor oppress him." 

5th. Such is the nature of American slavery, that not even its 
warmest friends would claim that it could recover itself after such a 
"year of jubilee" as God appointed. One such general delivery of 
its victims would be for ever fatal to it. I am aware that you deny 
that all the servants of the Jews shared in the blessings of the " year 
of jubilee." But let me ask you, whether if one third or one half 
of your servants were discharged from servir» w, «' every fiftieth year — 
and still more, whether if a considerable J.Y. portion of them were 
thus discharged every sixth year — the remainder would not be fear- 
fully discontented ? Southern masters believe, that their only safety 
consists in keeping down the discontent of their servants. Hence 
their anxious care to withhold from them the knowledge of human 
rights. Hence the abolitionist who is caught in a slave state, must 
be whipped or put to death. If there were a class of servants 
amongst the Jews, who could bear to see all their fellow servants go 
free, whilst they themselves were retained in bondage, then that 
bondage was of a kind very different from what you suppose it to 
have been. Had its subjects worn the galling chains of American 
slavery, they would have struggled with bloody desperation for the 
deliverance which they saw accorded to others. 

I scarcely need say, that the Hebrew words rendered " bondmen " 
and " bondmaids," do not, in themselves considered, and independ- 
ently of the connexion in which they are used, any more than the 
Greek words doulos and doule, denote a particular kind of servant. 
If the servant was a slave, because he was called by the Hebrew 
word rendered " bondman," then was Jacob a slave also : — and even 
ftill greater absurdities could be deduced from the position. 

I promised, in a former part of this communication, to give you my 

feasons for denying that you are at liberty to plead in behalf of 

tlavery, the example of any compulsory servitude in which Jews 

nay have held foreigners. My promise is now fulfilled, and I trust 

iat the reasons are such as not to admit of an answer. 

Driven, as you now are, from every other conceivable defence of 

- aveholding it may be (though I must hope better things of you), 



60 

that you will fly to the ground taken by the wicked multitude — that 
there is authority in the laws of man for being a slaveholder. But, 
not only is the sin of your holding slaves undiminished by the con- 
sideration, that they are held under human laws ; but, your claiming 
to hold them under such laws, makes you guilty of an additional sin, 
which, if measured by its pernicious consequences to others, is by no 
means inconsiderable. The truth of these two positions is apparent 
from the following considerations. 

1st. There is no valid excuse to be found, either in man's laws or 
any where else, for transgressing God's laws. Whatever may be 
thought, or said to the contrary, it still remains, and for ever will 
remain true, that under all circumstances, " sin is the transgression 
of the (Divine) law." 

2d. In every instance in which a commandment of God is trans- 
gressed, under the cover and plea of a human law, purporting to per- 
mit what that commandment forbids, there is, in proportion to the 
authority and influence of the transgressor, a fresh sanction imparted 
to that law ; and consequently, in the same proportion the public 
habit of setting up a false standard of right and wrong is promoted. 
It is this habit — this habit of graduating our morality by the laws of 
the land in which we live — that makes the " mischief framed by a 
law" so much more pernicious than that which has no law to coun- 
tenance it, and to commend it to the conscience. AVho is unaware, 
that nothing tends so powerfully to keep the traffic in strong drink 
from becoming universally odious, as the fact, that this body and soul 
destroying business finds a sanction in human laws'? Who has not 
seen the man, authorized by these laws to distribute the poison 
amongst his tippling neighbors, proof against all the shafts of truth, 
under the self-pleasing and self-satisfying consideration, that his is 
a lawful business. 

This habit of setting up man's law, instead of God's law, as the 
standard of conduct, is strikingly manifested in the fact, that on the 
ground, that the Federal Constitution binds the citizens of the United 
States to perpetuate slavery, or at least, not to meddle with it, we 
are, both at the North and the South, called on to forbear from all 
efforts to abolish it. The exertions made to discover in that instru- 
ment, authority for slavery, and authority against endeavors to abolish 
it, are as great, anxious, and unwearied, as if they who made them, 
thought that the fortunate discovery would settle for ever the great 
question which agitates our country — would nullify all the laws of 
God against slavery — and make the oppression of our colored breth- 



61 

ren, as long as time shall last, justifiable and praiseworthy. But 
this discovery will never be made ; for the Constitution is not on the 
side of the slaveholder. If it were, however, it would clothe him 
with no moral right to act in opposition to the paramount law of 
God. It is not at all necessary to the support of my views, in this 
communication, to show that the Constitution was not designed to 
favor slavery ; and yet, a kxv words to this end may not be out of 
place. 

A treaty between Great Britain and Turkey, by the terms of which 
the latter should be prohibited from allowing slaves to be brought 
within her dominions, after twenty years from its date, would, all will 
admit, redound greatly to the credit of Great Britain. To be sure, she 
would not have done as much for the cause of humanity, as if she 
had succeeded in bringing the further indulgence of the sin within the 
limits of a briefer period, and incomparably less than if she had suc- 
ceeded in reconciling the Sublime Porte to her glorious and emphati- 
cally English doctrines of immediate emancipation. But still she 
would deserve some praise — much more than if she had done nothing 
in this respect. Now, for my present purpose, and many of our 
statesmen say, for nearly all purposes, the Federal Constitution'is to 
be regarded as a treaty between sovereign States. But how much 
more does this treaty do for the abolition of slavery, than that on 
which we were, a moment since, bestowing our praise ! It imposes 
a prohibition similar to that in the supposed treaty between Great 
Britain and Turkey, so that no slaves have been allowed to be intro- 
duced into the United States since the year 1808. It goes further, 
and makes ample provision for the abolition and prevention of slavery 
in every part of the nation, save these States ; so that the District of 
Columbia and the national territories can be cleared for ever of slavery, 
whenever a majority of the parties, bound by the treaty, shall desire 
it. And it goes still farther, and clothes this majority with the power 
of regulating commerce between the States, and consequently, of pro- 
hibiting their mutual traffic in " the bodies and souls of men." Had 
this treaty gone but one step farther, and made an exception, as it 
should have done, in behalf of slaves, in the clause making necessary 
provision for the return of fugitives held to service in the States from 
which they flee, none but those who think it is fairly held responsible 
for the twenty years indulgence of the unholy traffic, would have 
claimed any thing more from it in relation to slavery. Now, this in- 
strument, which contains nothing more, bearing on the subject of 
slavery, than what I have referred to, and whose pages are not once 



62 

polluted with the words " slave" and " slavery," is abundantly and 
triumphantly cited, as conclusive authority in favor of slavery, and 
against endeavors to abolish it. Whilst we regret, that the true- 
hearted sons of freedom in the Convention which formed it, could 
obtain no more concessions from the advocates of slavery, let us 
honor their sacred memory, and thank God for those they did obtain. 
I have supposed it possible, that you might number yourself with 
those, who defend slavery on the ground of its alleged conformity 
with human laws. It occurs to me, that you may, also, take hope, 
that slavery is defensible in the supposed fact, that a considerable 
share of the professing Christians, in the free States, are in favor of 
it. " Let God be true, but every man a liar." If all professing 
Christians were for slavery, yet, if God is against it, that is reason 
enough why you also should be against it. It is not true, however, 
that a considerable share of our professing Christians are on the 
side of slavery. Indeed, until I read Professor Hodge's article, I 
had not supposed that any of them denied its sinfulness. It is true, 
that a large proportion of them refuse to take a stand against it. Let 
them justify to their consciences, and to their God, as they can, the 
equivocal silence and still more equivocal action on this subject, by 
which they have left their Southern brethren to infer, that Northern 
piety sanctions slavery. It is the doctrine of expediency, so preva- 
lent and corrupting in the American Church, which has deceived you 
into the belief, that a large share of the professing Christians in the 
free States, think slavery to be sinless. This share, which you have 
in your eye, is, as well as the remainder, convinced that slavery is 
sinful — only they think it inexpedient to say so. In relation to other 
sins, they are satisfied with God's way of immediate abandonment. 
But, in relation to slavery, they flatter themselves that they have dis- 
covered " a more excellent way" — that of leaving the sin untouched, 
and simply hoping for its cessation, at some indefinite period in the 
distant future. I say hoping, instead of praying, as prayer for an 
object is found to be accompanied by corresponding efforts. But 
for this vile doctrine of expediency, which gives to our ecclesiastical 
bodies, whenever the subject of such a giant and popular sin as 
slavery is broached in them, the complexion of a political caucus 
steeped in unprincipled policy, rather than that of a company of the 
Saviour's disciples, inquiring " in simplicity and godly sincerity, not 
with fleshly wisdom," the way of the Lord ; — but for this doctrine, 
I say, you would, long ago, have heard the testimony of Northern 
Christians against Southern slavery ; — and not only so, but you would 






63 

long ago have seen this Dagon fall before the power of that testi- 
mony. I trust, however, that this testimony will not long be withheld ; 
and that Northern Christians will soon perceive, that, in relation to 
slavery, as well as every other sin, it is the safest and wisest, as well 
as the holiest course, to drop all carnal policy — to " trust in the Lord 
with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding." 

Not only are Northern Christians, with very rare exceptions, con- 
vinced of the sin of slavery ; but even your slaveholders were form- 
erly accustomed, with nearly as great unanimity, to admit, that they 
themselves thought it to be sinful. It is only recently, and since they 
have found that their system must be tested by the Bible, thoroughly 
and in earnest — not merely for the purpose, as formerly, of deter- 
mining without any practical consequences of the determination, what 
is the moral character of slavery — but, for the purpose of settling the 
point, whether the institution shall stand or fall, — it is only, 1 say, 
since the civilized world has been fast coming to claim that it shall 
be decided by the Bible, and by no lower standard, whether slavery 
shall or shall not exist — that your slaveholders have found it expe- 
dient to take the ground, that slavery is not sin. 

It probably has not occurred to you, how fairly and fully you might 
have been stopped, upon the very threshold of your defence of slavery. 
The only witness you have called to the stand to sustain your sink- 
ing cause, is the Bible. But this is a witness, which slavery has it- 
self impeached, and of which, therefore, it. is not entitled to avail itself. 
It is a good rule in our civil courts, that a party is not permitted to 
impeach his own witness ; and it is but an inconsiderable variation of 
the letter of this rule, and obviously no violation of its spirit and 
policy to say, that no party is permitted to attempt to benefit his 
cause by a witness whom he has himself impeached. Now, the 
slaveholder palpably violates this rule, when he presumes to offer the 
Bible as a witness for his cause : — for he has previously impeached 
it, by declaring, in his slave system, that it is not to be believed — 
that its requirements are not to be obeyed — that they are not even 
to be read (though the Bible expressly directs that they shall be) — 
that concubinage shall be substituted for the marriage it enjoins — and 
that its other provisions for the happiness, and even the existence, of 
the social relations, shall be trampled under foot. The scene, in 
which a lawyer should ask the jury to believe what his witness is 
saying at one moment, and to reject what he is saying at another, 
would be ludicrous enough. But what more absurdity is there in it 
than that which the pro-slavery party are guilty of, when they would 



64 

have us deal, whilst their witness is testifying in favor of marriage 
and searching the Scriptures ; and, all ears, whilst that same witness 
is testifying, as they construe it, in favor of slavery ! IV o — before it 
will be competent for the American slaveholder to appeal to the Bible 
for justification of his system, that system must be so modified, as no 
longer to make open, shameless war upon the Bible. I would recom- 
mend to slaveholders, that, rather than make so unhallowed a use of 
the Bible as to attempt to bolster up their hard beset cause with it, 
they should take the ground, which a very distinguished slaveholding 
gentleman of the city of Washington took, in a conversation with my- 
self on the subject of slavery. Feeling himself uncomfortably plied 
by quotations from the word of God, he said with much emphasis, 
" Stop, Sir, with that, if you please — Slavery is a subject, which 

HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BlBLE." 

This practice of attempting to put the boldest and most flagrant 
sins under the wing and sanction of the Bible, is chargeable on others 
as well as on the advocates of slavery. Not to speak of other in- 
stances of it — it is sought to justify by this blessed book the most 
despotic forms of civil government, and the drinking of intoxicating 
liquors. There are two evils so great, which arise from this perver- 
sion of the word of God, that I cannot forbear to notice them. One 
is, that the consciences of men are quieted, when they imagine that 
they have found a justification in the Bible for the sins of which they 
are guilty. The other is, that infidels are multiplied by this perver- 
sion. A respectable gentleman, who edits a newspaper in this neigh- 
borhood, and who, unhappily, is not established in the Christian faith, 
was asked, a few months since, to attend a meeting of a Bible So- 
ciety. " I am not willing," said he, in reply, " to favor the circulation 
of a volume, which many of its friends claim to be on the side of 
slavery." Rely on it, Sir, that wherever your book produces the 
conviction that the Bible justifies slavery, it there weakens whatever 
of respect for that blessed volume previously existed. Whoever is 
brought to associate slavery with the Bible, may, it is true, think bet- 
ter of slavery ; but he will surely think worse of the Bible. I hope, 
therefore, in mercy to yourself and the world, that the success of your 
undertaking will be small. 

But oftentimes the same providence has a bright, as well as a 
gloomy, aspect. It is so in the case before us. The common at- 
tempt, in our day, to intrench great sins in the authority of the Bible, 
is a consoling and cheering evidence, that this volume is recognised 
as the public standard of right and wrong ; and that, whatever may 



65 

be tf-iei.* private opinions of it who are guilty of these sin?, they can- 
rai ,iope to justify themselves before the world, unless their lives are, 
apparently, at least, conformed, in some good degree, to this standard. 
We may add, too, that, as surely as the Bible is against slavery, every 
pro-slavery writer, who like yourself appeals to it as the infallible and 
only admissible standard of right and wrong, will contribute to the 
overthrow of the iniquitous system. His writings may not, uniformly, 
tend to this happy result. In some instances, he may strengthen 
confidence in the system of slavery by producing conviction, that the 
Bible sanctions it; — and then his success will be, as before remarked, 
at the expense of the claims and authority of the Bible : — but these 
instances of the pernicious effects of his writings will be very rare, 
quite too rare we may hope, to counterbalance the more generally 
aseful tendency of writings on the subject of slavery, which recog- 
nise the paramount authority of God's law. 

Having completed the examination of your book, I wish to hold up 
to you, in a single view, the substance of what you have done. You 
have come forth, the unblushing advocate of American slavery ; — a 
system which, whether we study its nature in the deliberate and hor- 
rid enactments of its code, or in the heathenism and pollution and 
sweat and tears and blood, which prove, but too well, the agreement 
of its practical character with its theory — is, beyond all doubt, more 
oppressive and wicked than any other, which the avaricious, sensual, 
cruel heart of man ever devised. You have come forth, the unblush- 
ing advocate of a system under which parents are daily selling their 
children ; brothers and sisters, their brothers and sisters ; members 
of the Church of Christ, their fellow-members — under which, in a 
word, immortal man, made " in the image of God," is more unfeel- 
ingly and cruelly dealt with, than the brute. I know that you intimate 
that this system would work well, were it in the hands of none but 
good men. But with equal propriety might you say, that the gaming- 
house or the brothel would work well in such hands. You have at- 
tempted to sustain this system by the testimony of the Bible. The 
system, a part only of the crimes of which, most of the nations of 
Christendom have declared to be piracy ; — against which, the common 
sense, the philosophy, the humanity, the conscience of the world, are 
arrayed ; — this system, so execrable and infamous, you have had the 
presumption to attempt to vindicate by that blessed book, whose Au- 
thor " is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and (who) cannot look 
upon iniquity" — and who " has magnified his word above all hi« 
name." 

9 



ec 

And now, Sir, let me solemnly inquire of you, whether it is right to 

do what you have done ? — whether it is befitting a man, a Christian, 

and a minister of the gospel 1 — and let me, further, ask you, whether 

you have any cheering testimony in your heart that it is God's work 

you have been doing 1 That you and I may, in every future work 

of our hands, have the happiness to know, that the approbation of 

our employer comes from the upper, and not from the under world, 

is the sincere desire of 

Your friend, 

GERRIT SMITH. 



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